Hoist the Jolly Roger!
Any excuse to use this picture.
Media piracy is a perennial topic. Creators of art are– I think rightly– upset that people can enjoy their work without any form of recompense. There are sometimes literally blood, sweat and tears poured into creative acts. Thoughts are torn from minds and made manifest in the physical world. That’s hungry work! People who do that deserve to eat. Not to mention put roofs over their heads. And all the other things money can buy. Morally, people who can afford to buy things- chose to take them without payment- are sleazy.
That doesn’t change the fact that piracy happens. Our system is set up so that piracy is easier and cheaper buying things, in many cases. Not to mention: Pirated media comes without the value-destroying software publishers of games and movies will often tie to their media. In these cases, pirates actually get a superior product– for free.
DRM (Digital Rights Management) seems to be doing everything it can be– and piracy seems to have settled to about a 90% rate. This is kind of craptacuar. It means that for every 10 people who enjoy the product of someone’s intellectual toil, only 1 person will pay. And, as mentioned above, the DRM model seems to be driving people from payment, rather than causing people to buy. Obviously, a new model is needed.
For video games, one possibility is micro transactions and smaller titles. Gone would be the days of big-budget extravaganzas for pay as you go entertainment. It would be like Hollywood saying “screw movies, we’re all doing TV.”
This model doesn’t really work for media other than games, however. I can’t imagine a book where you get the main plot free, but subplots and minor characters would cost. Frankly many movies (Avatar) would benefit from having things cut from them.
In many ways, piracy was the response to the lack of ability to purchase or create digitized media. For a while, if you bought a CD from Sony, Sony would try to destroy your computer for trying to create Mp3s. It’s technically illegal to digitize a DVD* that you legally own. It is still impossible to legally get digital versions of very many books.
None of this makes piracy a good thing. It is, however, important to note that consumers had and have a demand that is not being met through legitimate channels.
To really attack piracy, we need to understand what it is. Media piracy doesn’t (necessarily) happen when someone downloads something. It happens when someone uploads that media to someone else. The nature of modern sharing systems means that people upload to a lot of people at once. This is why monetary judgments against “pirates” tend to be so large: they’re on hundreds of separate counts. Indeed: it’s not even considered “piracy” until it becomes mass distribution.
From another point of view: media creators are having their work distributed for free. They don’t have to pay to have people create DVDs, nor ships to move those DVDs around the world, nor trucks to move those DVDs to ports, nor even the bandwidth to let people download digitized versions of those DVDs. Again: none of this makes piracy good, mind. But it does give a window into how it works.
One method of attacking piracy- then- would be to create a P2P network- or several- of books, movies, games, etc; and let people pay a set fee for access to that network. Does $20 a month sound reasonable? This is basically the Netflix “instant watch” paradigm applied to more types of media.
Imagine Steam, or Impulse, but for $20 a month, I had access to all the games I could play. With iTunes and Amazon selling me episode of TV, and Hulu streaming it to me, the whole concept of a “network” is losing traction. But if $20 a month would buy me access to every episode of every show that had ever aired on ABC, I’d be much more inclined to try and remember what shows aired on ABC.
I could even see networks reaching deals with ISPs: join Comcast and get access to everything on NBC, included in your internet package! RoadRunner might let you have access to Steam: the gamer’s delight deal.
The trick, I think, is to build systems where networks provide the seeds, and the more popular a show, movie, or game is the less it would cost a network to let people have access to it. P2P clients can do that. People would use them because, hey: high quality stuff at a great price. Artist get paid, networks become relevant again, and consumers get access to cool stuff. Everyone wins.
*In order to rip a DVD, you have to first break it’s encryption. And breaking that encryption– even to do something within your rights– is a violation of the DCMA.
