Smartboy's Site

My thoughts on pirating as relating to the music and movie industries.

Before we start off this discussion, let me first say that I don't support pirating. I am all for companies making money, that is the right of every company selling content within the US. However, there's a right way and a wrong way to make money, at least if you stick to the ideals that the US was founded on economically. This is what a lot of people do not either remember or understand, I am not sure which. But there's a reason for piracy, and there's an opening for a great company given that media companies cooperate.

To start off, lets take a look at the music industry, a very different beast nowadays from the movie industry. Originally, the first big case of piracy of music (in fact, the first big case in general) happened with the very well known Napster. While, yes, it was illegal, it still had a big impact on our culture and especially on the "non-techies" side of it. Before Napster, piracy of music did exist, but it mostly was done on usenets and other such places where mostly geeks dwelled. Peole didn't think of the internet of really being used for that, at least not until they got a taste of having what they wanted when they wanted it. Napster gave people this and more, and even after it left, it was quickly replaced with replicas of its success, although none got as big as Napster.

One could argue that it stems back to the 1980s and tape mixing, but that is not my point here. Tape mixing itself was usually done for the person, or many they duplicated the mixed tape and gave it to other people. There was still no way to really mass distribute the tapes to many people, which was its main problem and why it didn't impact the culture as much as Napster. So basically, to put it in perspective, the difference between tape mixing and Napster is the difference between handing flyers out to people on the street versus dropping them from a plane onto a town.

However, despite Napster and the "I want it now" idea that it brought with it, today music pirating is becoming more and more obscure. Why is  that? I'd argue it's because businesses finally got the right idea, and that the recording industry decided to adapt to the times. The arrival of Spotify in the US and the existance of Rdio already established in the US made a big impact on how many people pirated. Now, fewer peope feel the need because they can listen to any and all of the music they want to listen to for only a nominal subscription fee. It is a perfect business model for these times, it fulfills many peoples' needs, which is how business should be done in the US.

Now, lets take a look at the movie industry. Movie piracy wasn't around as much during the same time that music was being pirated, mostly because, at the time, movies were huge and couldn't be easily transfered beween computers. However, as internet speeds grew and compression algorithms developed for movies, thus paving the way for pirates to get their movies when they wanted. In fact, the movie industry had their own "napster" moment recently, albeit in a slightly different form.

Megaupload can be seen as the movie equivalent of Napster, and it had just as much impact on our culture as Napster did. People are now expecting to get movies on demand, this is why services like Netflix exist. Yet movie pirating hasn't gone down as much with Netflix, and there's a good reason for that: Napster is the equivalent of Encore on TV. For those who don't know, Encore was known for being one of the cheapest premium movie channels you could get, and they only showed bad or old movies, never recent good movies. Netflix's selection is similar for their streaming content, its either bad or old movies, never is it good or popular movies. Heck, it doesn't even have many older hits like some of the first disney movies or Universal movies.

Their DVD mailing service doesn't fulfill this niche either, but for a very different reason. Say I wanted to plan a movie night with friends, one which I wanted to watch all the original Star Wars movies or the whole Back to the Future series. WIth Netflix's mailing service, I could only get one movie at a time, and this means I'd have to watch one, wait a week or more until I can get the next movie in the series AND can get my friends back together, watch that one, wait another week, and so on. For a culture so impacted by the internet, this week of waiting is just too much, and the consumers do not want this.

The industry is ripe for the equivalent of Spotify or Rdio for movies to make the scene, offering top movies for a nominal fee. This would require cooperation from the movie industry, too, though the movie industry has so far been unwilling to change, and instead tries to cling to life by forcing consumers to their ideals. This is not how businesses make money, or at least not ho they should. They should offer a good product or service, one which consumers want, not fight. Until this happens in the movie industry, though, piracy will continue.

Just as an asside, I think piracy of applications like Photoshop and many video games indicates that this industry could be ripe for the same sort of thing, albeit in a different manner. In fact, this already exists on the mobile platform, so it will be interesting to see how the traditional desktop platform adapts with this. I don't foresee the desktop platform going away by any means anytime soon, at least not until there is a reliable way to make floating holographic screens or similar in order to make up for the tiny size of the small screens of mobile devices. Watching this all unfold will be interesting.