Turow’s piece, which appeared in this weekend’s New York Times, could have been a rallying cry to support American literature. Instead, it amounts to a hysterical rant full of slipshod reasoning that shows again the Guild’s propensity for tactical errors and alienating potential allies.

The central conceit of the piece is the U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause, which permits Congress to grant limited monopolies to “promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.” Turow, despite being a lawyer, miscasts the clause to suggest it awards a constitutional right to authors and to say that the current copyright system betrays the Founders. This is misleading twice over.

First, the grant of copyright is discretionary — as with many of the other items listed in Article I, Section 8, copyright is a power (like declaring war or borrowing money) that Congress can choose to exercise when it sees fit. The clause does not, as Turow writes, “instruct” Congress to protect authors’ rights.

The second problem with the constitutional conceit is that Turow and others would likely have been appalled by the Founders’ ideas about copyright protection. This was an age when Alexander Hamilton opted for piracy as an industrial strategy, and authors’ rights were precarious at best. Indeed, foreign writers received none at all (ask Charles Dickens what he thought of the Founders’ copyright law).

In lamenting the attenuated state of U.S. copyright law, Turow also fails to mention that protection for authors has been expanded from its original 28-year term to the life of the author plus 70 years. Congress and the courts, in other words, have signed off on a scheme that locks up titles like Presumed Innocent until the year 2100 or beyond — is this not enough copyright for you, Mr. Turow?

It is these absurd terms — plus harsh penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement — that have helped to make copyright such a mess in the digital age. In an era when the internet grants every writer a printing press and a distribution system, it seems absurd to hand out century-long copyright terms.

Instead of discussing how copyright can work in digital times, Turow instead lashes out at academics and librarians who are trying to find a way to distribute neglected books and locked-up research to broader audiences through efforts like the Hathi Trust. In my experience, these people respect copyright — they just don’t like the way that some abuse it — and their goal is expanding access to knowledge. Librarians at Duke are among those who are most forcefully challenging the current state of copyright; you can decide for yourself here if they are selling out authors.

In addition to a potshot at the Supreme Court, Turow also trots out the usual canard that sites like Google and Yahoo are complicit in book piracy with “paid ads decorating the margins of [their] pages.” While book piracy is indeed a problem, Turow’s suggestion that search engines are engaged in deliberate criminal behavior is far-fetched; these are mature companies with big and legitimate customers that have scant need or interest to pander to pirates. (While Google has landed in very hot water in the past over ads for illegal pharmacies, it now says it vies to curtail the bad advertising actors.)

In short, what Turow has done is to raise an important issue — how to devise an economic means to support modern literary culture — and then alienated nearly every potential ally, not to mention distorting the picture to his own ends. If Turow and the Authors Guild are really on the side of writers, they should toss the specious and acerbic arguments and work instead to build a coalition of advocates for a fair and workable copyright regime.

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If tech companies were serious about getting rid of patent trolls and spurring innovation, their first steps might be building a unified front and applying their ideals uniformly across their IP efforts. On Friday, for example, Google teamed with BlackBerry, Red Hat and EarthLink to file comments with the Federal Trade Commission about the scourge that is patent-assertion entities — institutions that get the rights to IP from operational entities (i.e., companies that actually sell products versus just sue) and then file lawsuits on their behalf. It’s a meaningful action and it addresses a real problem — Red Hat and Rackspace just emerged victorious after a lawsuit with a patent-assertion entity, in fact — but the backstory is a bit more convoluted.

For starters, a skeptic might argue, Google’s interest (and possibly BlackBerry’s, as well) is primarily about sticking it to Microsoft in mobile. After all, it wasn’t so long ago — May 2012 — that Google filed a complaint with the European Union accusing Microsoft and Nokia of engaging with a known patent-assertion entity, called Mosaid, in order to stifle the growth of the Android operating system in Europe. Before ultimately teaming up to acquire Kodak’s patents out of bankruptcy, Google accused Apple and Microsoft of teaming up to buy them and dump them into a patent-assertion entity.

Ironically, though, the very same FTC to which Google is now petitioning recently said the search giant has been abusing its own standard essential patents in mobile by pursuing injunctions against competitors who sought to license them — namely Apple and Microsoft. And BlackBerry, under its former RIM moniker, was part of an Apple and Microsoft-led consortium that bought Nortel’s IP assets in 2011, much to Google’s chagrin. I suspect these apparent hypocrisies only scratch the surface of what’s going on in mobile and across the IT landscape.

There are obviously some complex legal matters and business relationships at play here, but the solution to stopping patent trolling and other questionable practices is for a unified front. There’s plenty of blame to go around among Microsoft, Google and their peers, but placing blame is counterproductive.

Large companies have a lot of money and can effect a lot of change if they use it to fight for things in which they actually believe. If innovation is such a noble cause and the billions in economic damage is really such a problem, then collective and strong action against patent trolls and patent-asserting entities is probably a better solution than talking out of both sides of your mouth about the issue. Maybe they could put those legal resources toward suing the pants off of patent trolls and trying to get their patents deemed invalid, or in defending smaller companies against the high-volume, low-profile IP extortion that keeps patent trolls’ pockets fat.

If it works for Hadoop …

A drawing from a Google MapReduce patent.

The types of patent activity we’re seeing shape up in the big data space — around Hadoop, in particular — help serve as an example of what’s possible but also highlight the shortcomings of half-hearted efforts. One piece of good news that got a lot of attention is that Google has pledged not to assert its patents against anyone using techniques covered by its MapReduce patents. This essentially covers anyone using Hadoop because Hadoop is, in part, an open-source implementation of MapReduce.

Another piece of good news — possibly bigger than Google’s move — is that Rackspace, the latest target of patent troll Parallel Iron’s offensive against companies using the Hadoop Distributed File System, has decided to fight back. In an aggressive blog post on Thursday by SVP and General Counsel Alan Schoenbaum, the cloud-computing heavyweight explained its decision to sue Parallel Iron for breach of contract and to seek declaratory judgments that the patents in question do not relate to HDFS.

This is such a big deal because if Rackspace wins, everyone else facing similar claims by Parallel Iron could win, too. In an emailed statement regarding this lawsuit, a Rackspace spokesperson wrote: “We are asking for a declaration of noninfringement because we just don’t see how the patents they have cited just could reasonably apply to HDFS. We believe that other companies will also be able to use similar arguments to fight this troll.” If a court finds Parallel Iron patents unrelated to HDFS, that could serve as strong evidence of noninfringement in the other cases or to preclude the infringement claims altogether.

Further, every big victory against a patent troll means less money in their pockets, which is the only real way to stem the tide of lawsuits. As long as it’s still profitable, they’ll keep coming. Often, though, large companies opt to negotiate and settle with patent trolls rather than deal with the headache of litigation.

Large companies can strike strong blows against the problem by fighting and winning, and by using their bully pulpits to add fuel to a growing fire around patent reform. As Schoenbaum wrote:

Until Congress reforms the patent laws, companies of all sizes and industries could – and likely will – find themselves in the crosshairs of a greedy patent troll looking for a quick cash-grab. No company is immune, and, sadly, small companies can’t afford to fight. If they don’t succumb to the troll’s demands by settling, they face certain ruin.

Our goal with this lawsuit is to highlight the tactics that IP Nav uses to divert hard-earned profits and precious capital from American businesses. This time, the patent troll should pay us.

One has to wonder, however, if Google couldn’t help put an end to this whole question of HDFS patents by pledging non-assertion of its Google File System patents (HDFS is based on GFS) or trying to get Parallel Iron’s patents deemed invalid. Maybe the whole big data industry could be convinced to set competitive concerns aside and put resources behind that effort. (A Google spokesperson said the company is considering how and where to extend its non-assertion pledge but doesn’t have specific details to share right now.)

Whatever they do, though, technology companies need to stop bemoaning patent trolls and promoting innovation on one hand and then suing each other with the other. When they do that, technology companies look as out of touch, or maybe just as full of it, as the media companies that keep crying wolf about piracy without ever taking the fundamental steps necessary to solve it.

Feature image courtesy Shutterstock user Maksim Shmeljov.

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The plan comes as the fame of Grumpy Cat, a Snowshoe Siamese with a perpetually dour expression, continues to grow. Last week, the cat stole the show at the tech and music festival, SXSW, where people lined up for hours to take pictures with her. Grumpy Cat was also hired by BuzzFeed but had a bad first day on the job.

The trademark applications, which also cover hoodies and comedy videos, were filed in January on behalf of Ohio-based Grumpy Cat Incorporated. Los Angeles lawyer Kia Kamran, confirmed by email that the company is controlled by Tabatha and Bryan Bundesen, the siblings who own the cat and helped build her fame.

Kamran, who also represents Mike Tyson, says he hasn’t filed any Grumpy Cat lawsuits yet, but probably will soon in response to the “current wave of infringers that are popping up.” He adds that, while he’s sensitive to the cultural dimensions of internet memes, he’s had to take action on behalf of other clients, Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat.

Standing up for the feline will be a challenge, however, since Grumpy Cat is a cat not a person. Unlike human celebrities, animals can’t invoke “personality rights” which let them control their image. The Bundesens, if their application is successful, will nonetheless be able to control the commercial use of the phrase “grumpy cat” and photographs they own of the cat.

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Of note, just before the end of the year the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office temporarily invalidated Apple’s vaunted “pinch-to-zoom” patent, one of several found to be infringed by Samsung in August – generating a $1.05 billion damages award for Apple. On the same day, Kodak sold its imaging patent portfolio for $525 million to a consortium of 12 buyers (including none other than Apple and Samsung, along with HTC, Faceboook, Amazon, Fujifilm, RIM, Huawei, Adobe and Shutterfly).

In the coming year it’s a safe bet that global patent litigation and multi-billion dollar transactions will continue unabated, but here are a few other key trends we can expect to influence and shape the global IP marketplace.

The rush to the patent office begins

March 16, 2013, will mark the first day that the U.S. switches from a “First to Invent” to a “First (inventor) to File” system, under the America Invents Act (better known as U.S. patent reform). Whereas U.S. patent laws previously attributed priority rights to the first documented inventor, it is now largely the case that the first party to file a patent application will get the patent. Thus we can expect a rush to the patent office by companies large and small – adding to the already huge backlog at the USPTO of some 600,000 patent applications. Small businesses with limited legal budgets likely will be negatively impacted by the change, as it puts them at a pronounced disadvantage to their larger, better funded competitors.

Trolls will invade the cloud

With the number of patent lawsuits increasing every year – more than 3,000 were filed in the U.S. last year – there’s no reason to expect the pace to slow. Much of this litigation is fueled by so-called non-practicing entities, more popularly known as “patent trolls,” that base their entire business model on the use of patent enforcement, typically against multiple defendants.

Patent litigation in general, and troll litigation in particular, thrives in markets where the patent landscape is ambiguous, where there are complex products with multiple features, and where markets experience periods of explosive economic growth. The mobile market has seen its share of litigation frenzy over the last several years, and while the cloud computing market is clearly fertile ground, it will be at least five years before we see the type of  full-blown war mobile is now enduring. That said, the first signs of troll litigation are already emerging, such as CloudingIP, an NPE that filed patent lawsuits against RackSpace and several other defendants last year.

Copyright will take center stage

While patents have been all the rage in the IP marketplace over the last decade, content-related IP such as trademarks and copyrights are moving front and center with the proliferation of digital media and online content. Organizations such as Creative Commons have taken the lead in creating an infrastructure for the sharing of creative content online, giving the creator broad control over terms for sharing it.

The still-brewing debate over the ownership of Instagram photos, though, highlights another alternative to the creator-ownership approach – one that gives control over content to the platform that hosts it. The question moving forward is whether the copyright ownership of digital content will remain with creators or will be transferred to the platforms that host them

IP strategy is moving to the early phase

The Yahoo patent lawsuit against Facebook, filed on the eve of the Facebook IPO, highlights the need for startups to have a strategy around building a strong IP portfolio. While Facebook is no typical startup, it solved the problem in a non-typical way, by spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying patents from Microsoft to quickly increase its arsenal and defend against future litigation.

Obviously, few startups can afford a quick and expensive rebound like that, and therefore one lesson learned in today’s highly litigious marketplace is that any IP strategy needs to start from day one, even for cash-starved startups. Patent litigation against successful startups is picking up, and it is against this backdrop that IP strategy in the early phase is expected to become an absolute necessity for startups that wish to “cross the chasm” successfully.

Competition will go global

A recently published report by the World IP Organization (WIPO) revealed that in 2011, the number of patent applications filed in China exceeded those filed in the U.S. for the first time. That should come as no surprise to anyone following the pace of patent filing in China, an activity that has been prioritized by the Chinese government with the ambitious goal of reaching 2 million patent applications a year by 2015. Another noteworthy trend:  Of the list of the top-50 companies that received U.S. patents in 2011, the vast majority are foreign.

Both trends suggest the continued and increased involvement of foreign companies in U.S. patent litigation (as the mobile patent wars demonstrated), as well as the increased enforcement of IP rights overseas, and, in particular, in Asia.

Efrat Kasznik is president of Foresight Valuation Group, a Silicon-Valley based IP consulting firm, and is also a lecturer on IP strategy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You can find her on LinkedIn.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com

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According to Ericsson, Samsung entered into a licensing agreement with Ericsson in 2001 for the latter’s 30,000 patents relating to technologies ranging from Wi-Fi to GSM and LTE. They renewed the agreement in 2007, but after failing to reach a third renewal agreement following two years of negotiations, Samsung let the deal expire, Ericsson chief intellectual property officer Kasim Alfalahi said in a phone interview.

Alfalahi said that Ericsson has more than 100 cross-licensing deals with vendors across the industry, all with similar terms it has offered Samsung. Ericsson’s suit, filed today in a U.S. district court in Texas, is demanding THAT Samsung pay licensing fees in arrears and damages for willfully infringing its patents. If Samsung refuses to accept new a cross-licensing agreement, Ericsson wants an injunction against Samsung selling any equipment based on its patents, Alfalahi said.

These kind of licensing dust-ups are part and parcel for the telecom industry, which relies heavily on standards to build global networks. Though no single company controls the standard itself, they do own patents to the individual technologies and techniques that make up the standard. Consequently no vendor can build a phone or design a network without using the intellectual property of multiple competitors.

To prevent a single patent holder or group of holders from mucking up the standard, vendors are supposed to cross-license their intellectual property under Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Obviously how FRAND is quantified can vary considerably depending on how each company values its own patents. The result has been a lot of blood spilled over licensing fees, as evidenced by the epic battles between Qualcomm and Broadcom in the last decade. The nastiness of those patent wars have led companies like Apple and Google to buy up the patent portfolios of faded wireless giants like Motorola and Nortel in order to bulwark their intellectual property defenses.

“Our patents give us a right to exclude others, but with open standards we have all committed to license openly,” Alfalahi said. “We feel confident that we have given Samsung an offer we feel is FRAND. We feel any judge is going to see our offer as FRAND.”

Samsung’s fight with Ericsson is different from its battle with Apple because instead of focusing on handset design it revolves around core wireless technologies; in particular, infrastructure, a field in which Samsung was a minor player for most of its history. Samsung, however, has been asserting itself in the networking space in recent years, breaking into both the U.S. and European markets with huge contracts from Sprint and 3 UK. Not only are North America and Europe traditionally Ericsson turf, but Samsung’s recent success means the stakes are higher for both companies. The more equipment Samsung sells, the more of its revenue it has to pay out to its licensors. And Samsung has some big ambitions. It recently made the rather audacious claim it will become the No. 3 infrastructure vendor in the world.

We’ve only heard from Ericsson on this spat, though we’ve reached out to Samsung for comment and will update this post when we hear back. The disagreement is likely much less one-sided than Ericsson makes it appear since these deals are never one-way licensing agreements. Samsung is still a major player in the wireless world and has a huge patent portfolio of its own. That means Ericsson has to license Samsung’s intellectual property as well. Expect to see a counter-suit soon.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user opensourceway; Gavel image courtesy of Shutterstock user zimmytws.

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Proposed in August and coming up for first reading in the Bundestag this Thursday, the Leistungsschutzrecht – or, ancillary copyright — would give news publishers the exclusive right to control re-uses of their output, requiring others obtain a license even to excerpt.

Google fought back on Tuesday by using a google.de homepage campaign to ask users to complain to elected representatives, casting the issue as one both of fundamental freedoms and of practicality: “For you, it would be so much more difficult on the internet to find the information that you seek. Defend your network.”

It is a mark of how seriously Google is taking the threat that it is trying to appeal to users’ emotions, enlisting them to fight the proposals. Google argues Leistungsschutzrecht will “damage the German economy” and “threaten the diversity of information”.

German publishers have formed their own counter-campaign…

Google is widely thought to be allowed to crawl news stories of which it republishes only excerpts. Emerging law may suggest otherwise — a Belgian court ruled in 2007 that it did not have the right to run such excerpts and UK copyright authorities this year ruled commercial news aggregators (though not free alternatives like Google News) must pay a license for doing so.

In Belgium, news stories were only returned to Google after a private commercial agreement between it and publishers. So German publishers may feel confident in seeking an equivalent arrangement. And that would challenge the widely-held belief in free online excerpting.

But Germany is not the only front on which Google is facing a threat to these core values on which it operates…

This week an Australian court ruled Google had defamed a man wrongly accused of being a criminal in a web page not hosted by but indexed by Google for its search results.

That contradicts the settled view of many legal jurisdictions that online platforms are not to be considered publishers of information placed by others, though is consistent with other case law that holds such platforms liable from the moment they are made aware of infringing material on their platform.

My colleague, paidContent legal correspondent Jeff Roberts, says this may make it more likely would-be litigants shop for victories in forums like Australia.

France also recently set Google a year’s-end deadline for agreeing to voluntarily pay news publishers — or  it may legislate that it must pay a levy for the privilege. Google told French ministers such a compulsion would “threaten its very existence”.

So now Google is battling challenge to two of its central tenets — that it is not a publisher and only excerpts parts of articles.

Asked why its members don’t just block Google using robots.txt, the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers on Tuesday said via Twitter: “Robots.txt is a standard from the internet stone age. Why doesn’t Google want to use (alternative standard) ASCAP ACAP, that is the question.”

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That plan would, for example, harmonise the currently fractured entertainment licensing regimes to ensure online services can offer music, TV and more across national borders.

But do Europeans really want to get digital content from other member states? Research conducted for the EC and released this week is instructive for services thinking of benefitting from the single market, showing:

• Nineteen percent of Europeans are interested in receiving content from another EU country.
• That is only two percent more than the 17 percent of consumers who already do so, primarily by TV.
• Only three percent of citizens polled by TNS Opinion & Social said they were interested in receiving VOD from across European borders.

These figures do not suggest massive pent-up cross-border demand for online content services that want to upturn traditional licensing structures and smash through national boundaries. But, as is often the case, perhaps potential consumers don’t know what they really want until it is truly on offer.

Photo: Shutterstock / Silver Tiger

The prospect of a single market is nevertheless great news for Europe’s content production powerhouses. The UK is the country from which most interested citizens (42 percent) want foreign content, followed by Germany and France.

And, of those who are interested in getting content from outside their home nation, 31 percent say they are prepared to pay for it — 14 percent by subscription and 17 percent by pay-per-view or per-listen.

But the numbers of Europeans who want to consume content from elsewhere in Europe is broadly similar to the proportion who want it from outside Europe, too. Sixteen percent said they wanted to do so (12 percent for TV programmes, three percent for VOD and one percent for other), with U.S. content by far the most desirable.

And people are more prepared to pay for this non-EU content than for that from elsewhere in Europe – 19 percent via subscription, 21 percent via pay-per-view or per-listen.

The biggest reason for the findings is linguistic. Citizens may not desire TV shows or music from neighbouring countries since they are in different languages, but many are attracted to English-language content.

One positive outlook is that younger, more up-market consumers are more inclined to want cross-border content.

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To prove its point, the Village Voice is suing user-review site Yelp for posting pages like this one:

The Voice’s publisher now wants Yelp to pay triple damages for using the “best of” monicker in relation 10 cities, including Miami, St Louis and Dallas. The complaint also seeks an injunction against Yelp.

Yelp declined to comment on the lawsuit.

This isn’t the first time the Voice’s publisher has tried this trademark trick. Last year, the one-time icon sued Time Out New York over the magazine’s annual “best of NYC” issue. The publisher claimed it was asserting its intellectual property but Time Out New York counter-sued, arguing the term “best of” is generic. The Voice lawsuit provoked widespread derision from newer New York media sites like Gothamist.

More broadly, the lawsuits reflects Village Voice Media Holding’s efforts to find more revenue streams at a time when alternative newspapers have lost their cachet.  The company, now known as Voice Media Group, recently spun off its classified service, Backpage.com, which critics claim was a vehicle for sexual exploitation.

You can view the complaint, first reported by Law360 (sub req’d), against Yelp for yourself here:

IMAGE 10-29-12 112805

(Image by  Melle V)

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The study, which was commissionedby the Government Accountability Office, is encapsulated in a Duke Law and Technology Review article titled “The America Invents Act 500: Effects of Patent Monetization Entities on US Litigation.” The authors — Sara Jeruss of Lex Machina, Robin Feldman of the University of California, Hastings, and Joshua Walker of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP (and founding CEO of Lex Machina) — analyzed 500 random patent lawsuits since 2007 (100 per year) and concluded the number filed by suspected patent trolls (called “monetizers” in the study) rose from 22 percent in 2007 to almost 40 percent in 2011. Of the five biggest lawsuit filers among their sample set, four are monetizers.

This increase shouldn’t be surprising.  Our Jeff Roberts regularly covers such lawsuits in the technology world, including recently filed cases against Foursquare; a power trio of Facebook , Walmart and Disney; and pretty much everyone who built a product based on Hadoop. It’s this state of affairs that has spurred U.S. appellate judge Richard Posner to call the patent system dysfunctional, and has researchers, entrepreneuers and even Google devising methods to improve it.

Source: Jeruss et al. Suspected monetizers and individuals/trusts fall under “monetizer” label.

The problem could be particularly bad online. A 2012 Stanford Technology Law Review article found that patents relating to the internet are litigated almost 10 times more than non-internet patents. In a GigaOM post on Monday, Twitter General Counsel Ben Lee described a recent trial victory over a patent troll and said his company has been hit with three lawsuits from trolls in the past month and a half alone.

However, the new study notes, an increase in patent lawsuits can’t possibly account for what must be an extraordinary number of threats, forced licensing deals and other legal tactics that never make their way to court:

“Based on anecdotal evidence, albeit a mountain of such anecdotes, the vast majority of monetization activity never progresses to the point at which the patent holder actually files an infringement lawsuit. Given the costs of litigating infringement suits, the uncertainty of the outcome, and the potential for outsized judgment awards, companies may capitulate to a patent monetizer’s demands, rather than face the ordeal of a trial.”

A recent survey from the American Intellectual Property Law Association found the median cost of legal fees in a patent litigation ranges from $650,000 to $5 million depending on how much money is at stake. And researchers at Boston University recently concluded that patent trolls are have drained $500 billion from the economy since 1990.  A proposed law, which Twitter’s Lee supports, would force patent trolls to pay defendants’ legal fees if defendants prevail.

Although the “America Invents Act 500″ authors note there are limitations to their study and methodology, it would appear their classifications of operating entities (i.e., companies actually using patents) and monetizers is accurate. They note the concentration of lawsuits brought by monetizers in the plaintiff-friendly Texas federal court system, as well as the outcome of cases brought by trolls. That group is more likely to settle rather than go to trial, and more likely to get their claims dismissed via summary judgment or default judgment.

Source: Jeruss et al

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user zimmytws.

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More than three billion songs were downloaded illegally around the world via torrent in the first half of 2012, according to the Digital Music Index published by Musicmetric, a company that sells its torrent tracking services to content owners.

That is a huge number. This being the virgin index, however, Musicmetric cannot supply historical numbers with which to compare.

If it had, they would likely show unauthorised downloading is on the wane. The industry itself, in its 2012 Digital Music Report earlier this year, cites “progress” and says “the needle is moving” on the issue.

Last year, global music trade revenue fell by only three percent. In the U.S., the fall was just 0.1 percent. In other words, the decimation with which the business has become familiar has bottomed out.

Over the last year, several labels crossed the threshold at which digital gains are making up for physical losses. Here is why:

1. Legal services are blossoming

The number of easy-to-use legal, licensed music offerings, many of them offering free music to users, is growing fast, now numbering around 500 in 78 countries. Labels and policymakers alike have long believed that attractive legal services are the best antidote to piracy – and they are finally flourishing in number.

2. Governments are supportive

In countries like the UK, France, New Zealand and South Africa, labels have won government support for introducing graduated-response measures against persistent infringers, ranging from warnings to disconnection from the internet. When Sweden introduced a law under which freeloaders’ details would be shared with copyright holders, torrent traffic plummeted, albeit temporarily.

3. Labels are winning court support

Individual court decisions are also going labels’ way. Like in the UK, Finland, Denmark and Austria, where the country’s top ISPs block The Pirate Bay. In Britain, other sites pointing to unauthorised hosts are also getting taken down via injunction.

4. Intermediaries are playing ball

Search giants like Google and Baidu, enticed by the prospect of operating their own music services, are now making efforts to filter from search results links to illegally-hosted material. Likewise, payment processors like MasterCard, PayPal and Visa are working together with police to prohibit payments to unauthorised music sellers in Russia.

Several studies show freeloaders would stop downloading upon receiving just one warning. In France, where the controversial notifications agency Hadopi has been introduced, P2P use has reportedly dropped by 26 percent, pushing up iTunes Store singles sales in France by 48 percent, according to one study.

The music industry has long been engaged in a multi-pronged response to the decimation. To flourish like it did in the heyday of CDs, it needs legal adoption, piracy reduction and a range of other factors to happen all at the same time. That’s why it won’t take its foot of the anti-piracy pedal.

But, though numbers show unauthorised downloading is still commonplace, it is worth pausing to observe the industry has begun to go in the direction it wants.

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