Tuesday, Sep 18, 2012    Text size: 

WASHINGTON — The International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR) has published a Green Paper that identifies "six pragmatic ways for companies to limit the impact of piracy on their business."

The issue of stolen content and its ready availability online is not going to end, nor be resolved in the near future. However a dedicated piracy working group of IFFOR's Policy Council said it has identified current best practices for limiting it, 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 underway 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 pragmatic steps that any content producer or owner can take that will significantly reduce the impact of piracy on their business. They are:

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," said Joan Irvine, executive director, IFFOR. "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 their help on this paper — this report would not have been possible without their expertise.”

The Green Paper is available at http://iffor.org/news/piracy-paper.

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.