SURVEY: COPYRIGHT HOLDERS SPEND MILLIONS TO PROTECT THEIR WORKS ON THE INTERNET, JUDICIAL PROTECTION AGAINST PIRACY IS NOT EFFECTIVE

In the autumn, the Chamber of Commerce conducted a survey among members of the Cultural and Creative Industry Section on the topic of copyright infringement on the internet. A total of 23 respondents from among film producers and distributors, TV broadcasters, book publishers, as well as professional associations of copyright holders took part in the survey. The clear conclusion of the survey is that all respondents have experience with illegal sharing of their works online and are trying to combat it, but the current options for copyright protection on the internet are ineffective and too costly and time-consuming.

The aim of the survey was to find out how widespread illegal sharing of copyrighted works is in the online environment, whether copyright holders are spending resources to protect them and which services they consider the most harmful in this respect. The survey involved rights holders of films, TV series, books or music, most often companies in the SME segment, which exercise copyrights to units, tens, thousands and even millions of works.

Almost 90% of respondents said they monitor and report illegal sharing of their works online for deletion, most often by an authorised employee (83%) or an external company (39%). The most frequently monitored platforms are file sharing platforms (repositories), followed by YouTube and Facebook. The most frequently involved repositories are uloz.to, prehraj.to, fastshare.cz, datoid.cz, edisk.cz, sdilej.cz, webshare.cz and sledujte.to.

"In the survey, copyright holders independently agreed on a list of websites where massive infringements of their copyrights occur most frequently. While the operators of these services try to play the role of cloud storage providers who are not responsible for the content they store, it is gradually becoming clear that this alibi will not be enough for them for much longer. That is why the operators of perhaps the most famous service of this type, ulož.to, have decided to discontinue the option of public file sharing. We firmly believe that other repositories will soon follow suit and that internet piracy in this form will hopefully be eradicated soon,"

says Marie Fianová, Chairwoman of the Cultural and Creative Industry Section of the Czech Chamber of Commerce.

A second aspect of online piracy is the financial cost of protecting works. Nearly 40% of respondents said they spend more than CZK 50,000 a month on monitoring and reporting works, and 22% even more than CZK 100,000. A third of the respondents also chose to take the costly legal route, with more than half a million crowns spent in the past three years by a quarter of respondents.

"Copyright holders are spending hundreds of thousands to millions of crowns a month to protect their works on repositories, while the operators of these services still refuse to take their share of responsibility and implement measures to prevent their services from being used for pirate sharing of copyrighted works. This certainly does not seem right to us,"

adds Marie Fianová.

However, respondents consider protecting their rights at court to be costly and lengthy, and therefore ineffective in the long run. The creation of an out-of-court mechanism that could, as a last resort, make massively infringing websites inaccessible is suggested as a suitable solution.