CEA is splashing cold water on an MPAA...
CEA is splashing cold water on an MPAA study that says search engines aid in consumer infringement of online content. The survey repeats a familiar Hollywood refrain of blaming technology for content infringement “instead of providing your customers with the…
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experiences and products they want,” said Michael Petricone, CEA senior vice president-government and regulatory affairs, in a statement Wednesday. “Yesterday, it was the VCR and the MP3 player,” Petricone said. “Today, it’s search engines, Aereo and the Dish Hopper.” Contrary to the findings of the MPAA report, search engines don’t introduce consumers to infringing content, Petricone said. “Most consumers simply want legal, conveniently accessed digital content at a reasonable price.” Commercial piracy “is wrong and illegal,” Petricone said. “Violators should be prosecuted under existing laws. But the answer is not restrictions on search engines or the ability of Internet users to access information.” The MPAA study report, released Wednesday, said overall, search engines “influenced 20 percent of the sessions in which consumers accessed infringing TV or film content online between 2010 and 2012.” Moreover, consumers who view infringing TV or film content for the first time online “are more than twice as likely to use a search engine in their navigation path as repeat visitors,” it said. Most search queries that lead to consumers viewing infringing film or TV content “do not contain keywords that indicate specific intent to view this content illegally,” the study said. Nearly six in 10 queries that consumers use before viewing infringing content “contain generic or title-specific keywords only, indicating that consumers who may not explicitly intend to watch the content illegally ultimately do so online,” it said. “Additionally, searchers are more likely to rely on generic or title-specific keywords in their first visit than on subsequent visits.” MPAA based the study on an analysis of 12 million film and TV content sites “that were known to host infringing content” between 2010 and 2012, using a database compiled by Internet scanning vendors DTecNet and IP Echelon, the report said. The survey augmented that data with interviews with 1,065 Internet users in the U.S. and the U.K., it said. The interviews were done in late 2012 and early 2013, it said.