Posted on Thursday 25th of January 2007 at 13:38 in The Internet

Americans don't think piracy is wrong? I don't blame them

In my continuing fight for a more sensible world as far as digital media sharing I stumbled across a story with proof that American consumers don't consider illegal downloading a serious offence. Now there's numerous things you can say about this...

Why don't they consider it serious?
Well, I don't consider it serious but we'll get onto my reasons for that later but that's no excuse for everyone else. Is it because it's so common that it's not perceived as being "that" bad? I assume this is the case, that many users think it's fine because they always have a friend who pirates more stuff. I don't really care why people don't think it's illegal, I care about the solution.

The Solution

Organisations like the RIAA seem to think that suing everyone is the answer, which has to be the single worst idea possible. Suing the fans isn't the answer, and suing the distributors is only part of the answer - the real way to kick piracy on the head is to - wait for it - give people a viable alternative.

A viable alternative
People download things because it's cheaper - fact. Most pirates wouldn't mind paying a couple of pounds for a film but that's not an option. Saying that you're providing a viable alternative that costs as much as the physical item would in the shops and comes with a whole world of DRM attached isn't what I would call acceptable. The world needs a sensibly priced centre for downloading movies/albums that doesn't bring a kilo of DRM with it. Of course offering an alternative won't kill piracy but it will bring back a lot of it. Pirates aren't evil they're just regular people like me who don't wish to pay $20 for a film I download.

Look at iTunes
iTunes does a good trade selling music online but it's still too pricy for my liking, ?0.70 per track translates to more than ?7 per album, which you can get from Play.com. We need albums for ?2-3 to make a difference. Films for ?3 too - we don't want to pay high street prices for digital media.

In conclusion
We don't need to sue everyone under the sun; we need to create easy, financially viable alternatives for regular users. We don't want to pay the same for a digital version as we would for the physical one - because there's no advantage. If your hard drive dies then you're left without a film... Make being legal easier and then look at piracy, not the other way around.

 

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