Piracy - The issue and solutions

Since the dawn of the internet, users began utilizing their upload/download capacities to exchange files. Illegal or not, people would upload music, movies, software, and videogames for people to download for free. What used to be restricted to shoplifting has now expanded into an international epidemic; well, it’s not not bad. Really.

Let’s focus on music for now. Music is the highest illegally downloaded media in existence. This is not to say that movies, games and software companies aren’t suffering, but music seems to be the hardest hit out of the four. Who does this really affect? The answer may shock you, but it probably won’t. The hardest hit in the industry is, of course, the record labels; they take the biggest cut of the pie, along with intellectual rights, in exchange for making the artist’s music more well known. Artists make a lot more money on tours than they do on albums. This is why your favorite artists will delay their album, but will rarely, if ever, cancel their tours. The money really at stake here is that going to the labels. This has caused the music industry to mobilize to fight piracy.

Recently there have been bills in Congress (such as SOPA and PIPA) that go to greater lengths to protect the intellectual property of the record labels. This legislation, if passed, would completely censor parts of the internet in favor of the Music Industry and Hollywood. The bills could completely shut down or block websites that host any sort of illegal content. Unfortunately for the music industry, the bills have been shelved as there was a huge resistance among internet browsers. Do these extreme measures really protect media? Or do they just hurt the consumer?

The biggest dent in piracy has been the act of legitimately acquiring music online through services such as iTunes and Spotify. People pirate because it’s easy, not because it’s free (well, okay, a lot of people do, but that isn’t the point). Instead of driving to a record store to buy an album, people could just download it at home for free. Since iTunes launched a couple of years ago, people can still download music, but they can have a clear conscience since it was purchased legally. Moreover, the music was ready to be synced to the popular iPod, where it can be listened to on-the-go. While this simplicity carries a price, it’s much more appealing to the average person than figuring out how to get uTorrent working.

Labels are taking the wrong approach. Instead of suing Limewire for 74 Trillion dollars, they should be focusing on how to make money off of music that is even more convenient to access than piracy facilitates. Competing with free isn’t so hard when you have less effort and the law on your side.

In my next post, I will be focusing on how Facebook is actually using social capital to prevent piracy in terms of Music and Movies. I may also write a short post on how Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a completely ineffective way of preventing the piracy of software.