2009 in review: We will all be victims of the war on piracy

Anti-piracy moves will raise costs and undermine privacy

Ever since Napster came out the media industry has been in a panic about piracy, and this year it took steps to impose new laws on use that will see our computer costs increasing to prop up their business model.

Piracy is rampant across the internet, with millions of songs, films and pieces of software pirated every week across the world. This year, legal moves to combat piracy got teeth, and they are going to make life very difficult for IT managers and individuals in the coming year.

On a country by country basis, new anti-piracy laws have been introduced with mixed success. After many failures France finally got a 'three strikes and you're out' law on piracy for businesses and consumers, and the UK government ignored its own expert advice and announced plans for similar laws.

Sweden too has been in the spotlight, as the trial of the owners of the Pirate Bay torrent aggregator site finally came before a judge and lost. The case isn’t quite closed yet, but Pirate Bay is clearly on its way out and similar sites will also be in the sights of the media lawyers.

But while individual countries have been writing their own piracy policies, the heads of state, or rather their civil servants, have been working on a new treaty – the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

The negotiations around ACTA are being carried out with unprecedented secrecy, and with good reason. Judging by the little information that has been dribbling out onto sites like Wikileaks, the ACTA treaty will ensure that the cost of internet access will rise, IT managers will face a huge new source of headaches and privacy online will be severely eroded.

As it stands, the ACTA treaty has been described as a media company wish list. It would institute a global 'three strikes and you’re out' rule, and recruit national customs and law enforcement to act as copyright police. Some negotiators are even calling for iPods to be checked for pirated material at national borders.

Thankfully the biggest opponents of ACTA are the internet service providers. They don’t want to have to perform deep packet inspection on all their traffic, mainly because it’s very expensive but also because it will alienate customers. The postal service wouldn’t last long if it insisted that it had to open all your mail before delivery to check the content.

From an IT manager’s perspective it’s the three strike rules that will cause the most headaches. The evidence for piracy will be coming from media companies, who have a record for spreading their net wide and offering little proof to support accusations.

The widespread use of IP spoofing technologies means that the number of companies and individuals falsely accused of piracy will skyrocket. IT managers will be getting threatening letters and will find it very difficult to prove innocence against piracy accusations. But no company can survive without internet access these days, particularly so with the rise of cloud services.

Some politicians like ACTA, since they recognise that introducing laws in their own countries would be incredibly unpopular. The advantage of something like ACTA is that those laws can be enacted and our elected officials can simply say that the laws are needed to meet our international trade obligations and that their hands are tied.

There is no doubt that the internet has made piracy more common than it has ever been and this poses some risk to the media and software industry. But the sector has weathered such storms in the past (remember the 'Home taping is killing music' campaign?) and will do so again.

But by forcing other people to pay to support their business model, the media industry will be imposing costs on the rest of us that we should not, in all conscience, be carrying.