If you take the advertising out of the illegal sites, 95 per cent of them would disappear: Mike Weatherley

Interview with Conservative MP for Hove and Portslade

In October this year Google started deranking pirate sites. In November UK prime minister David Cameron endorsed a report that says that Intellectual Property (IP) education should become a part of the curriculum in British schools. Much of this is a result of the work Mike Weatherley, who was till recently the Intellectual Property (IP) Adviser to David Cameron, has been doing. A bulk of Weatherley's approach to tackling piracy is housed in three reports - Follow the Money, Search Engines and Piracy and recently Copyright Education and Piracy. The Conservative MP for Hove and Portslade displays in these some path-breaking ideas on fighting piracy in creative industries, a huge contributor to the UK economy. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar spoke to Weatherley on the sidelines of the CASBAA Convention in Hong Kong recently. Edited excerpts.

You champion the use of education to tackle content piracy…

About 20-30 years ago people in England would drink and drive and it was ok. Now it is no longer a cool thing to do because we have been educated, there is peer pressure. And that is what you need to fight piracy, to win hearts and minds. There are several reasons piracy is wrong, one is of course the moral one. The second is the economic reason, it hurts the people who work in these businesses. But to communicate this you cannot get a famous person to give the message in say schools. Because the impression is these guys get the money. You need to get new artistes, who are trying to break through. A new band's music was downloaded so many times by a Russian site that its record didn't do well and therefore the record company wouldn't do a second album. They should be telling young people about their experience. Also within schools at some point, the curriculum should include IP education so that youngsters learn to respect intellectual property.

It is not just young people older people too use pirated films and music for convenience or price…

All age groups pirate but the younger ones have grown up with a free product and expect it to remain free. The older ones know that we have to pay. We have already lost one generation to the idea of free content, we don't want to lost the new generation. And of course industry needs to adapt and offer more options such as streaming or rental.

Is intellectual piracy typical of entertainment products or is it a general moral dilemma?

The usual argument for piracy is that 'I wouldn't have bought it otherwise, so what is the problem.' But research shows that people tend to consume the same amount of music whether bought or not. That is an intellectual debate. Just because it (music or films) is less material does not make stealing it less criminal. The general rule in piracy is to follow the money. If you take the advertising out of the illegal sites, 95 per cent of them would disappear. The vast majority of illegal sites make money.

When it comes to IP and piracy what are the things that have maximum impact?

The success in controlling piracy doesn't come from prosecuting people but from getting them to stop it. There are a lot of new ways of stopping piracy. In the short term it is disruption, which is what Follow the Money and Search Engine reports are about. (These reports primarily recommend making pirate sites unsearchable and unadvertisable thereby drying up funds and controlling the reach of pirates) In the long-term it is education.

What is the status of your recommendation on search engines and piracy?

Google has implemented the 'autocomplete' recommendation which deranks pirate sites. (This means that in a search result if a pirate site comes up, Google will push it down the ranks if it has been notified that this is a pirate site). This was implemented globally last week (mid-October) and the downloads on BitTorrent (a popular pirate site) have apparently fallen by half. Deranking then ensures that they are starved of advertising revenues, which is the main source of income for pirate sites. In addition in England, a right holder can apply to the court to get an ISP (Internet service provider) to block an illegal site. And if the court says it is illegal then not just the ISP but everyone has to block it.

Asian countries have a horrible record on piracy. Your advice to the bodies fighting it here.

Every country should have an IP person. The UK and US have done that and addressed the problem much better. It cannot be someone from the government but someone outside who advises it. Also piracy needs a dedicated police force, it can't be part of the same force that is fighting other crimes. The UK created the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit or PIPCU last year.