Piracy is a service problem. Back in the early 2000s pirates simply offered a better service.
The gaming industry understood that and quickly created online marketplaces for games.
The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier - spent the 2000s trying to sue grandmas who filmed their kids dancing to copyrighted music.
"Piracy is a service problem" means that most people pirate because they don't have access (or difficult access) to the product/service they want. They would gladly pay for it, but they can't, or can't be hassled to.
I don't know if it's been backed up by real data, but services like Steam and Spotify tend to confirm this intuition.
Oh, ho hum. Music piracy was rampant until iTunes and the iPod changed the game to the extent of forcing (alongside court orders) Napster to go legit. Two decades later, music streaming is ubiquitous, consumers are satisfied, and music piracy is a retro anachronism. This is just applying market pressure to bring about necessary product innovation through other means.
Whenever such arguments arise, I'm reminded of Gabe Newell, who said something along the lines of "Piracy is a service problem" means that most people pirate because they don't have access (or difficult access) to the product/service they want. They would gladly pay for it, but they can't, or can't be hassled to.
It seems that "Piracy is a service problem" is still not in people minds.
Steam already proved that.
Spotify already proved that.
The netflix of 7 years ago proved that.
Best sellers such as witcher3 that had no DRM what so ever also proved that.
It's not about long tails or any other argument, it's much simpler than that. People are willing to pay for a decent service, people are unwillingly to have extra work.
A Pirate website is never going to be more accessible than an official one always because of funding to do proper UX, so, even if all kinds of DRM were forbidden, actual legal services would always have the upper hand, and the better their service the less of a need for piracy.
When steam started getting traction, PC piracy plummeted. When spotify became available, same thing happenned for music. When each film studio didn't have its own streaming service, the piracy was falling. Witcher 3 was a best seller on PC (and this is an AAA game, not a 5$ indie) when you could just copy paste your friends installer instead of buying.
Everything is so goddam simple, provide good service, good value, and only people that don't actually have the budget to buy your stuff will pirate.
Piracy is like union strikes, yes they are annoying and bring profits down, and it's bullshit that I have to wait 5 hours for a train because of a strike. But it is a necessary mechanism of power balance.
> If people can trivially access content 'for free' they generally will do that.
"trivially" is not so simple.
what about app store access in every device? from tv boxes, phone to PC.
what about shared settings, data etc between them?
there is no success pirate story on that, only techies that have such hobie have something compared to an actual nice setup. It's the "why dropbox" comment. Pirates can't get enough money or legal ground to build something comparable to what a legal company can build. This means it's ok if it is forbidden to block bullshit practices like DRM and remote deletion, if you actually care for the customers, no pirate app/website can compete with you.
The reason I stopped pirating music wasn't because I thought there was anything wrong with it.
I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather than pirate.
Spotify offered something better than free.
It's time for industries that haven't caught up with the times to start rethinking their business model. Opinions on IP aside, piracy is going nowhere and trying to fight the pirates based on ethics is futile.
Believing that piracy is solely a Service problem is pretty naive or downright ignorant. Yes, some people pirate because other means of purchasing the content in question are inferior but lets face it: People will always prefer the free option
I disagree. People said the same about music, and now you can buy DRM free mp3 and flac downloads because of previous pirating pressure. Most piracy is a symptom of bad services.
The solution to piracy is not taking measures to prevent it, but rather offering a product so pirating would seem like a terrible alternative. Take Spotify as a prime example.
When I was a kid I pirated music like it was no ones business. I didn't really stop until Spotify came to the US and signed up. For the price of $10/month, I could listen to all the music I ever wanted. Even though at that point I had a good system for pirating music, I pretty much gave up pirating music because Spotify was just so damn good.
Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it.
If it weren't for software pirates, countless old pieces of software (esp. DOS-era games) would be forever lost now. Society owes software pirates a huge debt of gratitude for keeping historical digital data archived.
However, I feel your perception of the piracy/p2p communities might be dated. I think they took a bit of a nosedive a while back when Netflix reigned supreme, at least for movies, but due to the fragmentation of streaming services and the constant removal of content and increase in prices and now the crackdown on account-sharing, movie/TV piracy seems to be alive and healthy. I'm not so sure about music piracy though; the streaming services there haven't made the huge mistakes the movie/TV services have, so having a single streaming service for music seems to be quite popular these days because it's so convenient. Software piracy appears to be largely dead, thanks to the move to SaaS and online gaming. But my perception could be quite biased too.
Not entirely - one problem I had with piracy, and I did it from the 90’s on, was finding new music. Spotify opened up catalogs with algorithms that piracy never could. Short of going to Strawberry’s and looking around… for cds to copy from friends, piracy never really had that same Spotify algo service that said “if you like this you’ll like that.”
Piracy was mainstream in the early 90s/2000s. It was only when iTunes came out and the RIAA lawsuits successfully killed the p2p clients that it tamed back down.
I read a pretty interesting article, in Delta's Sky mag of all places, about GrooveShark and similar services. Companies that are successfully flourishing in spite of piracy seem to have a common thread among them; they view piracy as the competition.
They ask the 'right' questions such as "what is it that sucks about piracy", and "how do we make our service fill that hole?" Similarly, the question Valve asked (and answered brilliantly) was "how do we make our service more convenient than piracy?"
I found it to be an interesting contrast to these old media behemoths that view piracy as something wholly different than user experience/convenience. The customers want fast access to content. Piracy is currently the only way to achieve that with a lot of the media owned by these aging corporations.
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