Illegal downloading is, apparently, a real problem. In 2012, the Financial Times reported that file-sharing costs the UK approximately £500m a year. £500m! That’s a lot of money; almost as much as the salaries of a dozen Hollywood actors in fact. While organisations such as FACT (The Federation Against Copyright Theft) are becoming increasingly concerned about the welfare of music moguls, TV stars and Hollywood celebrities, I’m not really sure that there’s much to be concerned about. If we look at the bigger picture, couldn’t illegal downloading actually be a good thing?
The freedom to distribute music online means that success is no longer limited to those who have a lucky break; if you have a microphone, a computer, and a bit of software, you have everything you need to become a global sensation, even if you have a boring name or the face of a bloodhound. Of course, newcomers realise that they can’t expect people to pay £10 for an album of songs they’ve never heard before, so they stick their songs online for free and make a living (or at least try to) by gigging. Realistically, that's where the revenue is going to come from so, to help everybody out, that's exactly why we should be redirecting expenditure towards live performances and away from record sales.
The fact is, there isn't a shortage of good music out there, but what there is a shortage of is people that are willing to produce it without expecting to become rich, famous superstars. Free distribution of music levels the playing field: It helps us support genuine performers who are motivated by doing what they love and exposes those that are just in it for an easy ride. Score one for illegal downloading.
The level of exposure generated from file-sharing is something marketers could only dream of and is oddly welcoming. The creator of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, for instance, has stated openly that illegal downloading helped the show to succeed (which in its first two seasons was suffering from low ratings). “[File-sharing] led to a lot of people watching the series, becoming aware of the series, who otherwise would not have been”. Similarly, the creators of South Park, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, appear to be advocates of file-sharing, stating “we’re always in favour of people downloading, always… it’s how a lot of people see the show”. And they should know; it’s the mass-sharing of the original South Park pilot that led to the show being commissioned in the first place.
Some people simply can’t afford subscriptions to expensive TV services but, thankfully, many of them now offer a much simpler system. ‘HBO Now’ for instance means you no longer need a mortgage to pay for their round-the-clock coverage; you can just pay to see what you want. Similarly, in the UK, we have Sky on Demand, and the low fat version of Sky: ‘Now TV’. So, instead of paying £50 a month for four good channels and 600 you’ll never watch, you can just pay a couple of quid for what you want. The conception of these services is owed to the change in climate generated by the ease of file sharing and, without it, they never would have existed. Chalk another one up for illegal downloading.
Cinemas need to give customers a reason to want to visit them, and charging thrice the price for a ticket and £3 for a bottle of coke just isn’t going do it. Really, cinemas only have themselves to blame for turning people away and they should be doing exactly the opposite to get them back; charging less and giving more. As per the suggestions in my last blog post, there's much more cinemas could be doing to get people through their doors; connecting them with bars, cafés, restaurants, and showing sporting events and TV shows. They’re not quite there yet but, as soon as they figure it out, we’ll all be much better off.
In 2008, EA (Electronic Arts) thought they could get around this illegal downloading business by sticking some Digital Rights Management (DRM) on their games. What this meant is that, when you handed over £40, you didn’t actually pay for the game, you just paid for a licence to use it whenever EA felt like you should (you can install it three times, then it stops working). This was a pretty lazy approach to tackling piracy and obviously didn’t go down particularly well the gaming community. They responded, and, as a result, the first game to really push DRM, Spore, (humorously) become the most pirated game in history and one of the worst rated games on Amazon.
Clearly, when people are punished for buying something legitimately, they’ll just want to download it instead. “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem” says Gabe Newell, CEO of Steam, and he knows what he’s talking about. Over the past decade, Steam (the online games store) has become a hugely popular and profitable way of distributing games. The idea is pretty simple: Once you’ve bought a game through Steam’s library, you can download and install it anywhere you want, as many times as you want, and get free updates every time they’re refreshed. So, sure, you could download a game illegally, but why would you want to? You’d miss out on all the free stuff. Getting it legally gives you a much better deal.
The increase in illegal downloads is, again, what has caused this need to change the way developers distribute their products, and it’s working. Gabe has said "Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company”. So, as a result of illegal downloading, game developers that are passionate about their customers’ needs are coming out on top, and customers are getting more for their money and a much better experience overall. Everybody wins.
ISPs don’t have the resources to spy on everyone and couldn’t do this without jacking up the price of their services, which they won’t be doing in a hurry. However, even if an ISP, or others, could snoop on your internet activity, file-sharing software allows users to encrypt their downloads. If the ISP finds a way around that (and that’s a lot of work), you can buy a subscription to a VPN service which hides all of your internet activity instantly and doesn’t store any logs of what you’ve been up to. Checkmate.
Of course, some media is too expensive to dish out in exchange for a few adverts but it’s easy to charge people for a service when you’re offering something you just don’t get with illegal downloading; the convenience of browsing a huge library of media, personalised recommendations, free content (and, for Amazon Prime, free next-day delivery). Clearly, they’re doing something right as, over the last couple of years, Steam is soaring and subscriptions to Netflix have exploded.
By studying the virtues of illegal downloading, we can see that it’s actually doing quite a lot of good. Realistically, it’s hugely unlikely that any of these services would have existed if it weren’t for file sharers forcing media distributors to offer content in a much more convenient and efficient way. Now, TV shows are more popular than they've ever been, we have all the music we can eat, and have access to a range of great services across all of our electronic devices - and we have the illegal downloaders to thank for getting us there.
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| Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/binary-null-one-digital-blue-797274/ |
Music
The first victims of illegal downloading, so we’re told, are musicians. Sharing tracks online obviously has a big impact on record sales, and that’s a bit of a problem if that’s your only source of income. Now, if you’re the type of musician that wants to waltz into a record studio, pump out a no. 1 hit and live off the royalties, you’re in a spot of bother. It’s not like you get by through live touring either because, if you can’t sing without a voice enhancer, you’ll need to mime at your gigs, and noone wants to pay to see that. If, however, you’re the kind of musician who tours frequently, sells merchandise and participates in media events, record sales are much less of a big deal. Your success comes from putting on a great show for your fans and blowing the roofs off your gigs. That’s not something you can download.The freedom to distribute music online means that success is no longer limited to those who have a lucky break; if you have a microphone, a computer, and a bit of software, you have everything you need to become a global sensation, even if you have a boring name or the face of a bloodhound. Of course, newcomers realise that they can’t expect people to pay £10 for an album of songs they’ve never heard before, so they stick their songs online for free and make a living (or at least try to) by gigging. Realistically, that's where the revenue is going to come from so, to help everybody out, that's exactly why we should be redirecting expenditure towards live performances and away from record sales.
The fact is, there isn't a shortage of good music out there, but what there is a shortage of is people that are willing to produce it without expecting to become rich, famous superstars. Free distribution of music levels the playing field: It helps us support genuine performers who are motivated by doing what they love and exposes those that are just in it for an easy ride. Score one for illegal downloading.
TV
Next on the illegal downloaders’ hit list are TV shows. In 2012, Game of Thrones broke the record for being the most pirated show in history. Since then, it has broken the same record each year (and probably will for years to come). You would expect then that the people responsible for the show, whose jobs are supposedly in jeopardy, would be furious. Well, they’re not; they’ve actually been pretty upbeat about the whole thing. The cast call the illegal-downloading record a “back-handed compliment” and the CEO of Time Warner (owner of HBO) claims it’s “better than an emmy”.The level of exposure generated from file-sharing is something marketers could only dream of and is oddly welcoming. The creator of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, for instance, has stated openly that illegal downloading helped the show to succeed (which in its first two seasons was suffering from low ratings). “[File-sharing] led to a lot of people watching the series, becoming aware of the series, who otherwise would not have been”. Similarly, the creators of South Park, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, appear to be advocates of file-sharing, stating “we’re always in favour of people downloading, always… it’s how a lot of people see the show”. And they should know; it’s the mass-sharing of the original South Park pilot that led to the show being commissioned in the first place.
Some people simply can’t afford subscriptions to expensive TV services but, thankfully, many of them now offer a much simpler system. ‘HBO Now’ for instance means you no longer need a mortgage to pay for their round-the-clock coverage; you can just pay to see what you want. Similarly, in the UK, we have Sky on Demand, and the low fat version of Sky: ‘Now TV’. So, instead of paying £50 a month for four good channels and 600 you’ll never watch, you can just pay a couple of quid for what you want. The conception of these services is owed to the change in climate generated by the ease of file sharing and, without it, they never would have existed. Chalk another one up for illegal downloading.
Films
Like TV shows, films have become a lot more accessible through online streaming services (it makes a lot more sense to rent a film once than to pay a tenner to stash it away in your cupboard), but what about new releases at the cinema? A couple of years ago, FACT commissioned a ‘hard-hitting’ advert to highlight the perils of downloading films illegally. A cinema was shown covered in cobwebs with the audience gradually fading away. “Imagine this... all gone” says the monotonous man, sadly. What this advert does though, quite expertly, is highlight precisely why downloading films shouldn’t impact on cinema ticket sales: When you pay for a cinema ticket you’re not just paying for the privilege of seeing a film, you’re paying for the opportunity to watch it on a huge screen, in surround sound, in an air conditioned theatre with your friends. You’re paying for a night out. The only people that are really threatening cinema ticket sales are those that think they can emulate the experience in their lounges by firing up their 36” TVs and putting on their little black glasses. Not quite the IMAX, is it?Cinemas need to give customers a reason to want to visit them, and charging thrice the price for a ticket and £3 for a bottle of coke just isn’t going do it. Really, cinemas only have themselves to blame for turning people away and they should be doing exactly the opposite to get them back; charging less and giving more. As per the suggestions in my last blog post, there's much more cinemas could be doing to get people through their doors; connecting them with bars, cafés, restaurants, and showing sporting events and TV shows. They’re not quite there yet but, as soon as they figure it out, we’ll all be much better off.
Games
Lastly, we have games. What’s interesting about games is that they evolve constantly; they need frequent updates and bug fixes to keep them running smoothly. Because of this, you can’t really expect to push a game out to stores and forget about it. Releasing one standalone product also means it can be copied and, subsequently, become a prime target for pirates.In 2008, EA (Electronic Arts) thought they could get around this illegal downloading business by sticking some Digital Rights Management (DRM) on their games. What this meant is that, when you handed over £40, you didn’t actually pay for the game, you just paid for a licence to use it whenever EA felt like you should (you can install it three times, then it stops working). This was a pretty lazy approach to tackling piracy and obviously didn’t go down particularly well the gaming community. They responded, and, as a result, the first game to really push DRM, Spore, (humorously) become the most pirated game in history and one of the worst rated games on Amazon.
Clearly, when people are punished for buying something legitimately, they’ll just want to download it instead. “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem” says Gabe Newell, CEO of Steam, and he knows what he’s talking about. Over the past decade, Steam (the online games store) has become a hugely popular and profitable way of distributing games. The idea is pretty simple: Once you’ve bought a game through Steam’s library, you can download and install it anywhere you want, as many times as you want, and get free updates every time they’re refreshed. So, sure, you could download a game illegally, but why would you want to? You’d miss out on all the free stuff. Getting it legally gives you a much better deal.
The increase in illegal downloads is, again, what has caused this need to change the way developers distribute their products, and it’s working. Gabe has said "Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company”. So, as a result of illegal downloading, game developers that are passionate about their customers’ needs are coming out on top, and customers are getting more for their money and a much better experience overall. Everybody wins.
A losing battle
The core reason we should stop worrying about illegal downloading is because there’s absolutely nothing we can do to stop it. You could ask people if they wouldn’t mind awfully not downloading torrents, but that’s not going to work. You could ask ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to catch the illegal downloaders themselves but, since they’re not wild about having a reputation for getting their customers thrown in jail, that’s not going to work either. Besides, ISPs know that people use their services for illegal downloading and don’t really want to stop them; they even use it as a selling point. (Long before HD video streaming made an appearance, you’d be pretty hard pushed to reach “30Gb/month” of downloads legally.)ISPs don’t have the resources to spy on everyone and couldn’t do this without jacking up the price of their services, which they won’t be doing in a hurry. However, even if an ISP, or others, could snoop on your internet activity, file-sharing software allows users to encrypt their downloads. If the ISP finds a way around that (and that’s a lot of work), you can buy a subscription to a VPN service which hides all of your internet activity instantly and doesn’t store any logs of what you’ve been up to. Checkmate.
What next?
Trying to stop people sharing media online is expensive and, ultimately, futile. Perhaps, then, instead of fighting it, we should embrace it. Like any other online service (social media, search engines, online magazines), you should be able to access what you want for free providing you’re willing to put up with a few adverts. If not, you simply pay for an uninterrupted service. It’s a system that’s used by Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, All 4 (and pretty much every on-demand service for that matter), and it works.Of course, some media is too expensive to dish out in exchange for a few adverts but it’s easy to charge people for a service when you’re offering something you just don’t get with illegal downloading; the convenience of browsing a huge library of media, personalised recommendations, free content (and, for Amazon Prime, free next-day delivery). Clearly, they’re doing something right as, over the last couple of years, Steam is soaring and subscriptions to Netflix have exploded.
By studying the virtues of illegal downloading, we can see that it’s actually doing quite a lot of good. Realistically, it’s hugely unlikely that any of these services would have existed if it weren’t for file sharers forcing media distributors to offer content in a much more convenient and efficient way. Now, TV shows are more popular than they've ever been, we have all the music we can eat, and have access to a range of great services across all of our electronic devices - and we have the illegal downloaders to thank for getting us there.
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