Piracy: Its All About Open Rights Management

Piracy is a word now synonymous with copyright infringement, but where did it originate from and what is happening today to address it?

Ben Sheffner in his blog Copyrights & Campaigns traces the equation of "piracy" with infringement back to an English bishop named John Fell, the Bishop of Oxford, who lived 1625-1686 and who resuscitated the fledgling Oxford University Press after the Restoration. During this pre-Statute of Anne period, “piracy” was widely used to describe unauthorized printing of books. Adrian Johns in his study of book publishing in England, The Nature of the Book, piracy had a “technical meaning” in the seventeenth century: “a pirate was someone who indulged in the unauthorized reprinting of a title recognized to belong to someone else by the formal conventions of the printing and bookselling community.” Piracy “soon came to stand for a wide range of perceived transgressions of civility emanating from print’s practitioners.”

Today some 350 years later the internet has reintroduced the term across all digital media with some such as the Pirate Bay choosing to use the association to describe their business.

The French Government has attempted to create a 'three strikes and you're out' law but has failed to get it through their parliament. The plan, involves internet subscribers receiving two warnings about illegal file-sharing activity and then being cut off from the internet.

The UK Government has previously threatened the ISP (internet service provider) industry with such a law but Davis Lammy the UK government minister responsible for intellectual property has now ruled out a 'three strikes' law stating it was not "the right road" for UK law makers. Lammy has stated in The Observer, that disconnection is off the Government agenda.

The recent Digital Britain report proposed the creation of a 'rights agency' and has asked companies that produce copyrighted material to contribute to a consultation on exactly what that agency would be and how it would operate. Lammy says that ‘the solutions are going to be commercial solutions. They are going to be solutions that are about ensuring people pay for content, but the ease of paying is there.’.

Importantly in today’s environment Lammy says ‘Copyright has largely been the domain of lawyers and of creatives…We are moving into an environment where so many people have to be aware of being on the right side of the law, but at the moment accessing those rights is not a straightforward process for the consumer.’ He said, ‘I want to show the person in the street that the system actually works in their interests. I want them to see it helps keep them in work.’

So piracy, infringement and protection of copyright is on the agenda of governments and there are signs that they are grappling with the open management of rights. Maybe much of the current debate about orphans in publishing is not down to them being lost but about using technology to record and manage the rights given to them and protecting them from being land grabbed for commercial gain.