New music industry plan: halt flow of money to pirate music sites

The international music trade group IFPI has found a way to shut down, it hopes, piratical iTunes-style websites operating in countries like Russia and the Ukraine—it wants to curtail their ability to accept major credit cards. Both the credit card companies and the UK police have agreed to act on the music industry complaints.

IFPI has proudly announced a new copyright enforcement initiative. It boils down to this: IFPI will submit allegedly infringing websites to the London police department's Economic Crime Directorate. Once the division has "verified the evidence," it will pass the information to MasterCard and Visa.

The card providers will then "require the acquiring bank providing the retailer with payment services to produce evidence of appropriate licenses to sell music or cease providing those services to the retailer," IFPI explains. The group adds that MasterCard has promised to respond to law enforcement requests "expeditiously."

In fact, IFPI says that the details on 24 suspect online music outlets have already been turned over to the cops.

Best practices

IFPI says that "industry anti-piracy experts have drawn up best practice procedures for MasterCard and Visa," though the best practices here will "help identify infringing websites and prevent them from being granted card payment facilities."

The City of London's Economic Crime Directorate says it's gung-ho to get started on the project. "This is an excellent example of how the police can work with different business sectors to effectively tackle the impact of economic crime, in this case music piracy," declared Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Head of the ECD.

Looking over the division's directorate, there doesn't seem to be a department that is purposed to this specific sort of work yet—although there is a credit card unit and a dedicated check and plastic crime section. But the ECD does say it will cooperate with the Metropolitan Police Film Piracy Unit, long at the service of the movie industry's Federation Against Copyright Theft.

FACT has been working with UK law enforcement to prosecute file sharing sites like Filesoup. But the police dropped that case recently, eventually admitting that the legal basis for a criminal trial wasn't there.

Still, getting the banks to cut off credit card support was a big piece of how Russia's AllOfmp3.com music download service was undone several years ago—that and forcing Russia to crack down on Allofmp3.com as a condition for joining the World Trade Organization.

Did that make a difference? It did to Allofmp3.com, though the US Trade Representative has just released a new list of "notorious" infringers in which "Allofmp3.com clones" get top billing. 

A similar decision by credit card companies and PayPal to curtail donations to WikiLeaks also affected that site's operations, and spawned a series of Anonymous attacks on the payment processors.

Reasonable measures

Here in the US, the proposed COICA Web censorship law now in Congress would require payment processors to stop helping pirates, though the decision about who's a pirate will at least be overseen by a federal judge. 

The bill also requires any ISP, financial transaction service, or advertiser served with a court order against a "nondomestic domain" to take "technically feasible or other specified reasonable measures to prevent such infringing activities from continuing." In other words, it gives the government power to shut down the site's domain, deny the site major credit card access, and force some of its advertisers to walk away.

In considering the AG's request for action, a court must determine four factors about the accused service:

1. Whether goods or services are being provided to US users
2. Intent
3. Prevention measures
   ("the Internet site has reasonable measures to prevent such goods and services from being obtained in or delivered to the United States")
4. Whether any prices for such goods and services are indicated in US currency

COICA at least proposes some mechanism for judicial review—even if most seizures of smaller foreign sites will apparently be nonadversarial. That stands in contrast to the UK IFPI process, which mentions no court review in its description.

We asked IFPI for more details about the plan. "I am afraid we can’t discuss this ongoing operation at this time," said IFPI spokesman Alex Jacob.

Jacob was a bit more forthcoming about our question on how IFPI expected the police to handle its complaints.

"The police make their decisions in collaboration with public prosecutors as this is a criminal matter," he explained. "Industry antipiracy investigators simply supply the police with evidence of suspected criminal activity."

We also asked if we could get a peek at those "best practices," but they aren't available; drawn up by "industry experts," they could give the bad guys information on avoiding sanctions.

"As these include advice to help payment providers on how to identify signs of illegal activity, you would not expect them to be published so that those engaging in such business could be aware of how to hide their activities," we were told.