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AFACT provided this pearl of wisdom a few days before a ruling was to be made in the appeal by the film industry against the verdict in favour of iiNet, that absolved it of being responsible for the downloading activity of its customers.
Soon after that, along came another study, this having been commissioned for the Australian Content Industry Group, which put a figure of $900 million on all the downloaded content - films, music, video games, software etc.
And last week, we had a third "study", claiming that while the music industry is making a lot of money, it "is not maximising digital music revenues mainly because of the amount of free music available online".
All this scaremongering appears to be some part of a bigger game - the secret negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. And that is evident from the draft of the IP regime that the US government wants implemented.
The draft (PDF) of the IP chapter, as of February 10, 2011, was leaked online a few days ago by a group called Knowledge Ecology International.
Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the United States are the countries involved in the negotiations. The talks began in March last year and the countries involved are hoping to see it finalised by the end of the year.
The 38-page draft sets out "tough new rules for patents, copyright and related rights including broadcaster rights and expressions of folklore, digital rights management information, trademarks, domain names, geographic indicators, regulatory test data for pharmaceutical drugs and agricultural products".
Draconian measures are proposed to be applicable to ISPs. Laws will have to be put in place to require ISPs to cooperate with copyright owners in preventing unauthorised storage and transmission of copyrighted materials.
Legal liability for ISPs will extend beyond the provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Internet users will, by law, have to be identified by an ISP if copyright owners have given "effective notification of claimed infringement".
There is also a proposal to extend the copyright period to a minimum of 95 years from creation of a work to a maximum of 120 years. Parallel trade in any copyrighted goods is ruled out altogether in the draft.
The "studies" that were referred to at the start of this article help to create the ground for pushing terms specified in the draft.
With the US economy faltering and no sign of any recovery in sight, it is to be expected that the Americans will be more aggressive than ever in trying to ram home as much as possible of this draft.
