TV and movie studios told the government this week that the increasing availability of legal online video sites and a wealth of content has also "taken much of the friction out of piracy," requiring vigilance on the part of everyone in the distributed network chain.
That came in a filing by the Motion Picture Association of America in response to a request from the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) for comment on a new joint strategic plan for IP enforcement.
"Once an unauthorized copy or stream of content becomes available on the Internet, it is available to the world," MPAA said.
"Online copyright theft persists, competing with the growth of the legitimate marketplace, stealing revenue, and undermining good U.S. jobs."
MPAA says that the distributed nature of the Internet calls for a collaborative approach to IP protection among ISPs, search engines, ad networks, payment processors, storage providers, and domain name registries and registrars.
Since the last strategic plan, MPAA points out that such a collaborative approach produced the Copyright Alert System, which alerts consumers when they are illegally sharing files via peer-to-peer technology (though not otherwise) as well as efforts by payment processors not to make it easy for infringing online transactions.
But MPAA also identifies areas that need improvement: 1. Using domain names for unlawful conduct; 2) the "prevalence" of pirate sites showing up on the first pages of search results; 3) and data storage services hosting websites that traffic in stolen content.
The government is in the process of developing its third Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement to cover 2016-2019. IPEC has to come up with a plant on IP enforcement and submit it to Congress every three years.
