Külföldi torrent oldalak The War Against Movie Piracy: Attack Both Supply And Demand

Piracy cannot be eliminated, but as I have argued, it can be corralled and contained with a deliberate strategy that involves copyright holders, government, and Internet intermediaries such as ISPs, hosting providers, online advertisers and payment processors. It’s imperative that piracy is addressed promptly, to give investors renewed confidence that the industry has a profitable future. The strategy should be based on the Economics 101 principles of supply and demand. It’s not enough to attack suppliers. As long as there is demand for digital pirated copies, there will always be room for pirate sites to thrive.

Part of the problem of simply going after copyright infringers is shown in the recently filed lawsuit against the operators of a ring of MovieTube websites by the U.S. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The complaint had to be filed against non-specific defendants (John and Jane Does and XYZ Corporations) because many MovieTube pirate sites operate under proxy registration surrogates, which makes it difficult to identify them. In non-technical jargon, here’s the paradox: Digital technologies, which dramatically improve the economics of content marketing and distribution, also make it easier for criminals to thrive because they can more easily go unnoticed or disguise themselves. In the MovieTube case, the operators of the ring of pirate sites apparently chose to take them all down shortly after the lawsuit was filed.

The MPAA’s legal strategy is understandable — one MovieTube site showed Disney’s Avengers: Age of Ultron before it even made it to theaters in certain countries. But it’s not enough to attack the supply of illegal content. A double-edged supply and demand sword is necessary to combat piracy, as follows.

Combat Supply of Pirate Content

The obvious supply-based approach is to combat the pirates themselves, in two ways:

1) Disable production of pirate copies. Studios watermark digital copies for each theater worldwide, effectively tracing and disrupting high-quality camcording in theaters. They have also developed best practices for vendors to avoid leakage of digital copies that end up in pirate sites. New technologies are also emerging to protect digital files from being copied.

2) Enforce copyrights. Studios pursue legal action against copyright violators, such as the recent legal complaint against MovieTube. But even if you have the legal grounds to do so, blocking or shutting down a site usually leads to more popping up. Just enforcing copyrights can become an endless battle. That is why other supply- and demand-based approaches make sense.

Improve Supply of Legal Content

Another approach is to supply legal content so it competes with piracy. “One of the best ways to combat piracy is to make more legal content available to consumers online, which the industry is aggressively doing,” says Howard Gantman, MPAA’s VP of Strategic Communications. Some industry efforts underway are:

1) Converge release windows. Theater release windows for movies are converging across the globe and digital releases are happening earlier, closer to the theater release. So legal content is becoming available whenever and wherever it was not previously, effectively creating competition against piracy.

2) Make it easy to find content. With the proliferation of online sources to download or rent movies and TV content, it is harder to shop for content. Gantman states, “There are currently more than 450 legitimate services available to access content around the world, and over 115 in the U.S. alone, with more options coming online almost every day.” To address this, the MPAA recently launched wheretowatch.com, where U.S. viewers can search for a movie, TV series or episode, and find all the legal sources of content, with associated prices.

3) Develop technological standards. The industry is busy developing and implementing standards to designate the analogous to SKU’s for every digital asset, and distribution codes (see Ultraviolet project) that enable consumers to purchase content once but watch it on multiple devices (e.g., DVD, laptop, mobile).

Reduce Demand for Pirate Content

Ultimately, it’s really about economics. Without demand, there’s no supply. But the moment supply of content emerges at an apparent zero cost to the consumer, demand will rise significantly. Therefore, demand should be independently corralled, contained, and discouraged, so it does not grow with supply.

1) Make the piracy experience unattractive. If quality goes down, demand goes down. Combating high-quality camcording in theaters helps the cause. The MPAA is also working with online advertising networks to discourage them from placing ads on pirate sites, and with payment companies (e.g., Visa V -2.90%, Paypal) to discourage them from intermediating financial transactions for pirate sites. As this happens, pirate sites turn increasingly to advertisers that deliver malware or steal personal identifying information. Dean Marks, Executive VP and Deputy General Counsel of Global Content Protection at the MPAA, adds, “The outcome is that the piracy experience has lower quality, and it is less reliable and user-friendly.”

2) Change social norms. A 2013 report, “Sizing the Piracy Universe,” underwritten by NBC Universal, found that “across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, 327 million unique internet users explicitly sought infringing content during January 2013. This figure represents 25.9 percent of the total internet user population in these three regions.” Piracy is rampant in part because consumers think there is zero cost to piracy. To address this, the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have teamed up with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to launch the Copyright Alert System, which alert active pirates on the illegality and negative consequences of piracy and also provides information on legal options.

A comprehensive approach, rooted in the basic economics of supply and demand, may be the key to making a substantive dent on movie piracy. Opposition by those who benefit and regulatory and technical hurdles will make it painful. But reversing an increasingly engrained culture of piracy may prove to be the biggest obstacle. More investment is needed to show consumers that piracy isn’t really a zero cost to them. It is a crime that can lead to punishment, and by entering pirate territory, consumers can become victims of other cyber-crimes like malware, viruses, and hacking. It is bound to affect the quality of content if producers and artists are not paid fairly. And then, there is the moral cost of going against one’s own values, which is being diluted as society increasingly condones piracy.