HARSHLY WORDED LETTERS NOT DETERRING PIRATES

June 15 2009

London, U.K. – Piracy in all its forms has been something that has long plagued civilized society. From the earliest recorded acts of piracy as far back as the 13th century B.C.E. against the Aegeans, to the battles waged by the Roman Empire, the rise of Vikings, to the battles in the Caribbean, piracy has always vexed even the most
advanced of societies. With generally less sophisticated technology and know-how, the energy and spirit of piracy has remained strong throughout, consistently defeating every attempt to quash its efforts.

The modern world is no different with piracy on the high seas as rampant as ever and fleets of internet users conducting full scale raids against civilization. Though governments have taken more traditional tactics to deal with sea-borne pirates, namely bullets, those of the digital variety have become a slippery menace still vexing authorities. Court battle after court battle has proven largely ineffective and attempts at securing product has generally spurred more piracy. Now piracy fighters are starting realize that their latest efforts, harshly worded form letters, are falling to stem the tide of piracy sweeping the internet.

“We conducted a survey and found that only 33% of people who received a letter from their Internet Service Provider would stop pirating content. That proves to us that a letter simply would not be enough in the majority of cases and that we would have to create a sort of ultimate sanction such as following up those letters with threatening court action,” said Alexander Ross of legal firm Wiggin. “The same survey showed that 80% of people would stop if those letters were followed by action such as cutting internet connections. This new data is really quite surprising because a lot of ISP’s spent considerable time and money drafting those letters and mailing them out to their clients, a lot of effort that seems to have gone for naught.”

Previous efforts with letter writing also failed to end piracy in the Caribbean tin the 18th century and has provided only limited relief to efforts in the Philippines. 

“There was a line of thought that many people adhered to the principle limitations behind written warnings was the difficulty in transmitting those letters to sea-borne ships and the extremely limited levels of literacy present through most periods of high piracy but what we are seeing in the modern age is that it may simply be that pirates choose not to listen to the demands of the letters even though they are perfectly capable of reading them,” said Scrape TV Piracy analyst Juan Lauzon. “Obviously literacy is an issue in Somalia which is one of the poorest countries in the world which is part of the reason that bullets work so well. Much of the web piracy though is being conducted by people who are more than capable of reading but apparently choose to do so very diplomatically.”

ISP’s throughout the U.K. has sent the notices through traditional mail services as well as vie emails to which the majority of internet pirates have regular access.

“It may be a product of not staying with the times. Perhaps if they transmitted these messages through more modern means than email – say Twitter or even IRC – they may get across to more people. Using Leet language might also go a long way towards distributing the message more effectively but the question of whether or not people will abide is still up in the air,” continued Lauzon. “The core issue here is that Pirates of any discipline are less likely to abide by requests than those who don’t engage in piracy. That is simply a part of their nature and the nature of the practice itself and so no matter how vigorously requested most simply aren’t going to cease their actions. We learned that in the Caribbean and we are learning that in the silicon world today.”

Similar strongly worded letters to ISP’s from customers have also largely gone ignored, raising the spectre of piracy for revenge.

Martin Philton, Technology Correspondent

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