How to Really Fight Online Piracy
Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 11:48AM 
"Liquid Library", Photos.comBy Anthony Leger
The growth of the internet has brought with it a wave of online piracy of movies and TV shows. The entertainment industry often gives dire warnings of what this will lead to and wants more done to stop it. What the industry fails to realize though is that a significant part of the blame for this problem rests squarely on their shoulders, and their stubborn refusal to adapt to the digital age.
People download pirated products for a variety of reasons, but two major ones are cost and convenience. While there are those who are going to pirate goods as long as they can get away with it, a large number of those pirating movies and TV would not do so if there were better legal alternatives. A convenient, reasonably-priced way of legal downloading would decrease illegal downloading and allow law enforcement to concentrate on more serious pirates.
In other words, the most effective, and only truly credible, method of dealing with piracy would offer the carrot as well as the stick. However, much of the entertainment industry has not only utterly failed to do this but in fact almost seems to be trying to encourage piracy.
An example can be seen with the region settings on DVDs. These settings make it impossible to play a DVD purchased legally in one area of the world in another. While this is meant to make things more difficult for pirates, the technology can be thwarted in seconds, and the region settings are quickly removed when DVDs are copied. So, while its effects on piracy are virtually nonexistent, the region settings are a huge inconvenience for those living overseas or for those who have purchased a legal DVD in another region.
This leaves people in a very perverse situation. While they cannot play their legally purchased DVD, which may not even be for sale at any price in their region, that exact same DVD if often available for easy, but illegal, download!
Another example of the hugely counterproductive, copyright restrictions and lack of any efforts by the studios to offer an alternative can be seen with the online rental and purchase of video. Shrewd businesses that wanted to serve their customers would have jumped at the chance to market directly to them online. However, more than a decade after the internet has reached mass appeal; the ability to stream or download movies and TV online is still limited at best. Furthermore, much of this content is not available online outside the USA at any price.
With policies like these, those who control this video content must take at least part of the blame for the rampant piracy we see today. They have had more than a decade to work out copyright, technical and other barriers to marketing their goods online and offering a quick, easy and reasonably-priced alternative to illegal downloading. However, they have done little but complain can call for more intrusive laws.
By now, anyone should be able to legally download or watch almost any video content they want online from wherever they are in the world. Be it rental, subscription, advertising or purchase, the owners of video content could be making substantial sums of money while reducing the appeal of illegal downloading with a convenient alternative. Instead, they cling to old marketing methods in a changed, integrated world.
Until the movie and television industries embrace modern technologies instead of trying to fight them, illegal downloading of their products will continue at a much larger scale than it would otherwise.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Anthony_Leger
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