Plausible Piracy Solutions

Now that I’ve discussed the several bad ways to go about fixing piracy (Crippling your own software, ludacris lawsuits, etc.) i’m going to take a minute to talk about effective solutions to the ever-growing problem. The most effective means to go about combating piracy is to make your software available.

First, let’s talk about Netflix. Netflix’ model has done more to combat piracy than really any other service on the internet. For a relatively cheap monthly fee, the user can access a plethora of movies, television shows, and documentaries without any restrictions.Since there’s a monthly fee, and the user isn’t charged per view, he doesn’t see a price tag pop up every time he wants to watch an episode of, let’s say, Breaking Bad (Something that iTunes could learn from). This causes people to want to watch more and more and more; they’ll never want to unsubscribe.  Moreover, the picture quality ranges from very good to excellent, and can be streamed to people with slow internet connections. This cheap, widely available service is a way to get people to watch their favorite shows without any sort of downloading, making it easier to get to than piracy.

Netflix is also using social capital to promote its service. At Facebook’s F8 last fall, Zuckerberg went on stage and announced his new model for Facebook. These changes including connecting your friends’ musical tastes to you through Spotify. He went on to state that the same service will be brought to browsers through Netflix’ new Facebook app. Now you can see what your friends are watching, and be inadvertently introduced to new television shows. This also encourages people to sign up to Netflix- the best possible way to stop the piracy of movies and television shows.

The videogame industry is also seriously hurt by piracy. The usual response by developers is to attach DRM to their games. As discussed in my last post, this does very little to curb piracy. Instead, developers use Valve’s Steam as a way to stop piracy. Steam acts a virtual marketplace for video games. They frequently have sales and deals, allowing users to purchase what would be otherwise expensive games for relatively cheap. Once you buy the game, you can download it an unlimited amount of times across an unlimited number of platforms. Steam also acts as an interface where users can connect with the community and their friends. The entire service comes at the awesome price of free. This cheap, and easily accessible service does wonder to stop the pirating of PC games.

Businesses need to learn that piracy isn’t going to go away by putting obstacles in the way of pirates. The people who distribute software and media are much more skilled and can work much faster than many of the top programmers in the industry. If business really want to stop piracy, they should drop their lawsuits, and invest that money in services that allow the user to easily access their products for a cheap price. They should be focusing on changing their business models, not the law.

Cheers.