subject: No Need To Panic Over Digital Piracy [print this page] The media, the government, and the entertainment industry have spent the better part of the last decade crusading against digital piracy, spending millions of dollars and tons of time to fight what can sometimes seem like a ghost. The panic surrounding digital piracy and its supposed ability to siphon millions of dollars annually from the entertainment industry is misguided at best though. What the industry should really be paying attention to is getting legal content providers up to speed with what customers want.
For most people in their late 20s or early 30s there are two types of internet users: those who have pirated music and those who lie about pirating music. Many people in their late 20s were old enough to download music when Napster first became popular and services like Limewire soon followed after Napster was shut down. However, even though most of that generation are guilty of downloading files illegally as teenagers, many of them have since grown out of it for several reasons, mostly because it is time consuming and inconvenient.
Which leads to one conclusion: most people actually want to do the right thing and pay for the music and movies they are using. The problem is that the real value is convenience and many legitimate service providers dont provide that value to customers. Even the CEO of gaming company Valve and online service Steam, Gabe Newell, has said that piracy almost always comes down to a service issue, not a pricing issue. Many times he references the lag time of game releases in the U.S. compared to other countries as an example of a service issue. If the product isnt available by legitimate means in a country for 3 months after its U.S. release, then pirates are going to get the product anyway they can, which is almost always illegally.
Many artists are starting to agree with this philosophy toward piracy and they also see it as an opportunity to change the antiquated money-making strategies within the industry. Some artists show very little concern about illegal downloads because they have found ways to make up for that plus some via shows and merchandise something that cant really be obtained without paying the artist. If an illegal download gets someone to watch or listen to something they wouldnt have before, then it actually works in the industrys favor.
By simply saying that digital piracy is the reason for the entertainment industrys financial woes is just another way of saying they have run out of good ideas. By refusing to update their current model and actually give people what they want (access online to television shows, movie, music, etc) they have shown that theyd rather take the easy way out and blame the pirates rather than looking at their own internal strategies.
