IFFOR Issues Green Paper on Policies to Reduce Piracy

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR) has published a Green Paper that identifies six pragmatic ways for companies to foil the efforst of pirates aimed at stealing their content. The issue of stolen content and its ready availability online is not going to end, nor be resolved in the near future. There are, however, methods to limit piracy, and a working group of IFFOR's Policy Council has identified current best practices as well as emerging methods that may prove effective at restricting the impact of piracy. The paper identifies what content producers already know: that the theft and distribution of material is widespread, socially acceptable among young adults, and has a significant impact on profits. It also recognizes the limits that exist with current methods for dealing with piracy and reviews latest efforts under way to get to the root of the problem—most of all removing the profit incentive and using the internet's own tools against piracy. Theft and distribution of content requires a multi-pronged approach. The paper discusses the six steps that content producers or owners can take to significantly reduce the impact of piracy on their businesses. They are as follows: 1) Register the copyright for your content. 2) Watermark or fingerprint your content. 3) Engage a DMCA agent. 4) Report abuse to search engines. 5) Report abuse to payment processors. 6) Take legal action. Each step is explored in some detail, with expert testimony and reference material provided alongside. “This paper is just the start of the compilation of the various ways for the industry to deal with piracy. We view it as a resource and will update it as other methods are available. I want to thank Trieu Hoang, general counsel at AbbyWinters and chair of IFFOR's Piracy Working Group, who spearheaded this effort along with attorney Chad Belville, for help on this paper. This report would not have been possible without their expertise," said Joan Irvine, executive director of IFFOR. Overall, the paper takes a pragmatic view of over a decade of piracy-reducing efforts and identifies what currently works best while also keeping an eye to the future. The Green Paper is available here. IFFOR is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing policies for top-level domains that maximize benefit to global internet users, domain holders and domain registry operators.