ISPs have many reasons to reach and convey information quickly to a targeted subscriber. Among those reasons, notice of copyright infringement is one of the more pressing. Organizations who represent copyright holders and who monitor and identify offending streaming data according to the guidelines of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) alert the respective ISP regarding the pirating source. The ISP in turn must pass on the notification to the infringing subscriber. Because of the ease of reaching subscribers online, PerfTech’s in-browser messaging system has become a highly effective vehicle for delivering DMCA notices. And importantly, because the PerfTech system logs and time-stamps all message deliveries along with the subscriber’s respective responses, the ISP can verify that it has fulfilled its obligation to notify if called upon.
In order to analyze response rates, we looked at DMCA message statistics generated by one large ISP-customer over a time span of nearly 22 months from January 2017 through late October 2018. Results follow:
2017 2018 (Jan-Oct)
Total deliveries to unique subscribers: 39,549 34,428
Percent who click to acknowledge the notice: 60.5% 58.1%
Percent who log in for content information: 13.3% 12.9%
Total percent who actively respond to the notice: 73.8% 71.0%
Summary: The numbers this year seem on track to be similar to last year’s. Note that the notice asks if the subscriber wishes to acknowledge or see more details regarding the infringed content.If the latter, the message expands and presents a choice to login or close. If “close” is chosen, the message is set to display again at a later time, meaning the same subscriber can choose to close multiple times. For this reason, the “close” button is not counted as part of the percentage of interaction, but it does indicate that the percent of subscribers who interacted with the notice is even higher than the already high average 72%. As a separate note, considering the approximate number of broadband subscribers that the ISP-customer serves, the number of subscribers receiving copyright notices represents about 3.3% of the total base.