The victory in the trial is nothing but an illusive extension of the nearly dead business model the companies are following.
Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma, writes in a blogpost at Torrentfreak of how everyone is a loser in the Pirate Bay Trial, the biggest of course being the common man in the middle. The real pirates will continue pirating regardless of this decision, the entertainment industry taking this as a win will continue with their out of date practises and ideas; the average user in the middle loses out on the innovation the entertainment industry should be (forced to) offer in all elements of the product, price, promotion and its distribution.
It isn’t as if any of the downloaders will, after the verdict, start purchasing music instantly; in fact piracy and file sharing will continue regardless, albeit in a less flamboyant manner. Instead of wasting their time and effort taking down websites like these the industry needs to address the question of why is music / movie piracy so widespread and what can be done to tackle it ? Even though it isn’t let’s assume the answer is Piracy is widespread because it’s become that easy and accessible that people will not pay for music. If that is the case the entertainment industry should look at ways to build a business model around it. Matt has explained in his books how pirates over the years have changed the world and fuelled innovation; after all it was Napster who got the digital music distribution ball rolling and now iTunes is the biggest music retailer.
Once again the point isn’t that the content creators shouldn’t be paid, in fact they fully deserve to be fairly compensated for their work. But these content creators and the companies need to understand, what Matt puts as, new market realities, where consumer preferences are different from what they were less than a decade ago. The business model hasn’t changed nearly as quickly as consumer preference, which still continues to evolve. In that light, the victory in the trial is nothing but an illusive extension of the nearly dead business model the companies are following.
Tags: business model, pirate, torrentRead More
Would you like a digital copy to go with that?
I was reading Matt Mason’s book titled The Pirate’s Dilemma which, broadly speaking, narrates how pirates have changed our world in more than one way by their own altruistic ways (we’ll come back to that later). A while after I remembered reading a quote by Machiavelli in the book but couldn’t find a reference to it in the index. That’s when I realised how useful it would be to be able to search through a book much like
the way we search through a virtual document everyday with our Ctrl + F. This got me thinking and I thought it would be quite easy to do that if I had the electronic version of the book.
I decided to search for a pirated version of the book (oh the irony) as soon as I was done with the chapter. When it came to it, I decided to look at the author’s website wondering if did actually practise as he preached and offered a digital copy of the download. And surely enough he did. The way Matt set it up was any website visitor is able to click on the link and download the book. In doing so the user is presented with an option to enter an amount he would like to pay the publisher. I of course selected zero because I had already paid for the book.
Later it got me thinking that what did in a way impress me (the digital download on the author’s website) should in fact become what Herzberg describes as Hygiene Factor, in the non business sense of course. Each purchase of a hardcopy of the book should be accompanied with a digital version of the book so the buyer is able to consumer the product wherever, however and whenever he chooses to. For those concerned with the issue of file sharing and distribution let me point you to Music Industry who has already, for most part of it, abandoned DRM and is still doing fine. The fact of the matter is those who wish who pirate, will pirate. I was going to have no qualms or difficulties in obtaining a pdf ebook version from one of many websites. But the fact that Matt and his publishers made it available to me was nice and got me thinking, why aren’t we given a digital copy with our purchases.
Tags: ebook, pirateRead More
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