Consumer Focus criticises MPAA evidence gathering
Consumer Focus, the statutory consumer organisation in England, Scotland and Wales, has written to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) raising concerns about the Digital Economy Act and the methods used by the MPAA to gather evidence of copyright infringement.
In an open letter, Consumer Focus notes that a 2008 trial warning letter scheme was found to have a 16% error rate, with more than 2000 people receiving warning letters incorrectly.
It is anticipated that under the Digital Economy Act 2010 up to 2 million “copyright infringement reports” may be submitted by the MPAA and BPI on behalf of Hollywood studios and record companies. Even a small margin of error would be significant, and tens of thousands of Internet subscribers could be wrongly identified by ISPs on the basis of your evidence and accused of copyright infringement.
IP address data is a problematic form of evidence for copyright infringement, because most broadband providers assign IP addresses dynamically rather than providing each subscriber with their own dedicated IP address.
Thus, every time a consumer connects to to the Internet from their home, their ISP may allocate a different IP address to their Internet connection. If the time of the alleged infringement is recorded incorrectly, if only by a few minutes, ISPs may match IP addresses harvested from p2p filesharing networks …incorrectly to Internet subscribers.
Consumer focus makes a number of recommendations for improving evidence gathering techniques, many stemming from a report by security expert Dr Richard Clayton. These include:
- Evidential transparency: “Natural justice demands that Internet subscribers should have access to the same evidence that copyright holders used to determine that there appears to have been a copyright infringement, and this includes the evidence gathering process used.”
- Hygiene checks, to ensure that IP harvesting systems “consistently record not only IP addresses, but also the time of an alleged infringement”.
- A “doctrine of perfection”, whereby “the failure of an ISP to match an IP address to a subscriber account at the time of an alleged infringement should trigger an investigation into the cause of this error”.
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