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.
No related posts.
Perhaps Hulu is going in the right direction? A friend of mine replied to my twitter of this blog post saying that he was ‘test running’ hulu+ for this very reason, and that getting entire seasons in HD on demand for $10 a month was totally worth going legit.
He also mentioned something about Funimation doing something similar with their anime.
Neither of these touch on the gaming industry… but it at least perhaps indicates that a few companies are starting to come around to the right idea.
I’m thinking that with cloud music getting off the ground with Echodio (which I still need to actually USE), it could be that the music industry will head in this direction also.
Hopefully gaming will follow suit eventually? I know some of the current DRM’s are horrid…
Though, games also face a unique problem when it comes to this type of solution. With streaming video or music… if there’s a temporary hiccup in connection, it isn’t a problem. With a game, it’s a HUGE problem. The DRM that only requires a verification when you start the game isn’t so bad, I think… it’s the ones that require a CONSTANT connection that end up being problematic?
Games are definitely a sort of unique problem. I’m downloading Civ 5 right now (I bought it legitimately, and it’s downloading in anticipation of being released soon), and the game is 4 gigs.
Part of the reason the distributor (in this case: Steam) is letting people download it early is to spread the bandwidth crush through time. Even if only 10% of people who have preordered it also preload it, it’s a huge savings on their bandwidth.
Imagine instead if they used a P2P network. And every 30 days you had to check in and validate that you were still allowed to access the game. That would mean that at peak download time, Steam (or whoever) would actually face the _least_ amount of bandwidth crunch.
And the way people actually play games is to only play for a month or two, anyway. So you could let people have a sort of “All you can eat” of a catalog, confident that they’ll be able to play whatever games strikes their fancy at the moment. At $20/ month, the publisher would take in $240 per year. Is there a publisher out there today that thinks I buy 4 full priced games a year from them?
Netflix is a major part of my life, and Hulu was until I got a TV (I’m on the fence about Hulu +), and I suspect these are the models of the future. However, I am concerned that this is a “tyranny of small decisions” situation. Right now Hulu and Netflix offer great libraries because all that content is produced by a business model that Netflix and Hulu are ultimately cannibalizing. I don’t know how many people would have to opt-in to these systems to replace the revenue lost from declining ticket sales and television ratings, but I suspect it’s quite a lot.
Pirates are not stealing from media companies (though they are the ones who make the most noise about it), they are stealing from the paying customers who support and finance the material being pirated. However, even if I am paying into Netflix and Hulu +, I suspect I’m still being subsidized by the people who troop out to the theaters or buy the ads to be seen by TV viewers. It’s better than nothing, but I’m not sure it’s enough to continue the production of the content I’m enjoying so much.
Now you might be right: it will force creators to be leaner and more disciplined. Less CG, more location shooting (please, for the love of God, less CG). But I have my doubts about this business model’s ability to produce shows like 30 Rock or The Wire, or films like Inglourious Basterds. And that would be a loss.
So I think these subscription or microtransactional models might be the future, but they’re only part of the solution. The other thing content producers desperately, desperately need to do is improve the service they provide customers and reduce what they expect for it.
For instance, I can’t tell you how many movies I’ve been in where the print looks like crap and the film is playing slightly out of focus. Stuff like that is suicide in the age of Blu-Ray. Or the $25 music album with one song you know you like. The RIAA never understood how vital it was that people were able to explore artists risk-free. Now think about how Arcade Fire was selling a new album for like $5 on Amazon MP3, and the whole internet exploded over it.
Right now I think a lot of the media are just in this no-man’s land. Piracy is a pretty obvious problem, but it’s also an easy scapegoat. What should worry them are declining audience numbers. That can’t be put down entirely to piracy. Each of these industries you mention has done something to alienate or disappoint formerly loyal customers. They need to figure out what.