The Center for Copyright Information (CCI) released a report last month summarizing the first calendar year of activity of the Copyright Alert System (CAS), the United States’ voluntary graduated response scheme for involving ISPs in flagging their subscribers’ alleged copyright infringement. The report contains data from CAS activity as well as results of a study that CCI commissioned on consumer attitudes in the US towards copyright and file sharing.

The way CAS works, copyright owners monitor ISPs’ networks for allegedly illegal file sharing, using MarkMonitor’s piracy monitoring service.  MarkMonitor determines which ISP manages the user’s IP address and sends a notice to that ISP.  The ISP then looks up the subscriber ID associated with that ISP address and sends a copyright alert.  The first two copyright alerts sent to a given user are purely educational, not requiring the user to take any action. Subsequent alerts proceed from “educational” to “acknowledgement” (requiring the user to acknowledge the alert in some way, similar to the way in which users agree to terms of use on websites) and then to “mitigation” (the ISP imposes some penalty, such as temporarily throttling the user’s bandwidth).

There are two alerts at each level, for a total of six, but the three categories make it easier to compare the CAS with “three strikes” graduated response regimes in other countries.  As I discussed recently, the CAS’s “mitigation” penalties are very minor compared to punitive measures in other systems such as those in France and South Korea.

The CCI’s report indicates that during the first ten months of operation, it sent out 1.3 million alerts.  Of these, 72% were “educational,” 20% were “acknowledgement,” and 8% were “mitigation.”  The CAS includes a process for users to submit mitigation alerts they receive to an independent review process.  Only 265 review requests were sent, and among these, 47 (18%) resulted in the alert being overturned.  Most of these 47 were overturned because the review process found that the user’s account was used by someone else without the user’s authorization.  In no case did the review process turn up a false positive, i.e. a file that the user shared that was actually not unauthorized use of copyrighted material.

It’s particularly instructive to compare these results to France’s HADOPI system.  This is possible thanks to the detailed research reports that HADOPI routinely issues.  Two of these were presented at our Copyright and Technology London conferences and are available on SlideShare (2012 report here; 2013 report here).  Here is a comparison of the percent of alerts issued by each system at each of the three levels:

Of course these comparisons are not precise; but it is hard not to draw an inference from them that threats of harsher punitive measures succeed in deterring file-sharing.  In the French system — in which users can face fines of up to €1500 and one year suspensions of their Internet service — only 0.03% of those who received notices kept receiving them up to the third level, and only a tiny handful of users actually received penalties.  In the US system — where penalties are much lighter and not widely advertised — almost 8% of users who received alerts went all the way to the “mitigation” levels. (Of that 8%, 3% went to the sixth and final level.)

Furthermore, while the HADOPI results are consistent from 2012 to 2013, they reflect a slight upward shift in the number of users who receive second-level notices, while the percent of third-level notices — those that could involve fines or suspensions — remained constant.  This reinforces the conclusion that actual punitive measures serve as deterrents.  At the same time, the 2013 results also showed that while the HADOPI system did reduce P2P file sharing by about one-third during roughly the second year of the system’s operation, P2P usage stabilized and even rose slightly in the two years after that.  This suggests that HADOPI has succeeded in deterring certain types of P2P file-sharers but that hardcore pirates remain undeterred — a reasonable conclusion.

It will be interesting to see if the CCI takes this type of data from other graduated response systems worldwide — including those with no punitive measures at all, such as the UK’s planned Vcap system — into account and uses it to adjust its level of punitive responses in the Copyright Alert System.