Content Piracy is a big issue for the media industry. This is why initiatives such as The Pirate Bay and Popcorn Time are so relentlessly pursued by associations such as the MPAA and BREIN in the Netherlands. What still baffles me is that they refuse to see the solution to the problem.
Institutes such as BREIN are very narrow-minded when it comes to this problem. They hammer on the need for repressive methods to stop piracy. They point to Popcorn Time as proof that offering a legal affordable alternative doesn’t solve the issue.
If BREIN needs an example why they are wrong, they should look at the music market. Since the introduction of services such as Spotify and Deezer piracy of music has been dropping considerably.
Joris Evers, the head of Communications at Netflix Netherlands seems to be a bit more level-headed on the subject. “Piracy such as Popcorn time comes from frustration”, he states in an interview with Draadbreuk.nl. (in Dutch)
What Joris Evers understands (and BREIN refuses to see) is that piracy comes from the fact that content is simply not made available in a way consumers want to consume said content. Most of it is locked away behind exclusive content deals, and other restrictions. For a market that claims to be about media (which is communications) they still fail to listen to their customer.
Instead the industry is stuck forcing a model on a market that doesn’t accept it, which has a striking similarity to the problem displayed below…
It is this failure to listen and understand the consumer needs which keep institutes as BREIN and MPAA fighting symptoms of a disease rather than the disease itself. Even more so, it’s a disease that is within the power of that industry to treat. It is the industry unwilling or unable to adapt and change their modus operandi, which prevents this problem from being tackled.
What needs to happen is that the content needs to be unshackled, by which I mean restrictions on who broadcasts what need to be lifted. Content should be available through whatever medium you wish to consume. Exclusive content deals, region encoding, it’s no longer of this time.
The consequence is that broadcasting companies and alike will have to find a different way of competing for customer attention, but this will be on price or quality or payment model or any other meaningful way to distinct yourself.
Getting rid of these artificial barriers will flush away the principle reasons for content piracy like a tsunami. If consumers were free on how and when they could consume their content how they saw fit, potentially ending up earning more in the process. It would likely degrade piracy from a industry-threatening problem to a minor nuisance.
The first step towards this solution requires an industry that is willing to pull its head out of its ass and rethink the way they do business and actually start listening to the consumer. What the world needs are more people that are willing to challenge and change an industry that has been left behind in the 20th century.
Organizations like BREIN might consider me naive, and maybe I am, but looking at how BREIN and the industry has dealt with the problem thus far and the results they have to show for it makes me confident that the solution to their problem is evolution, not repression. After all, only a fool repeat the same action and expect a different outcome.