Piracy: Your solution?
 

What would be your solution to piracy if you were in charge of the movie or music industry?

Besides pursuing a campaign of litigation against 12-year-olds?

Ba-da-ching!

Movie/Audio files downloaded on demand to a locked player.
Then, eliminate sales of media to be owned by individuals.
Boosk should be distributed this way, but they're limited by a good book viewer.

Tivo does this by storing programs, offering an individualized start time and playback rate of broadcast material. Until bandwidth meets customer demand, movies will need a few hours to be downloaded to the locked player. This will involve some planning, but it's not much different than picking up a movie rental a few hours/days before you watch it and blowing time dropping them off.

This will work for a while until someone hacks the locked box.
Cable receiver boxes were hacked, but Tivos so far seem to be
immune with their lock & key protection scheme.

One of the main problems with movies is their prevalence. The movie release rate has increased, and so has the frickin rental fees and movie theater ticket prices. If only ten movies existed for $100/piece, they would be valuable and few would allow their neighbors to copy. The sheer volume of material reduces its value to next to nothing. People have no problem "stealing" nearly valueless material. Books in the past cost a lot of money.
Now that you can purchase once rare classics for $5 from amazon.com, is it any wonder that the distribution medium and shipping charges dictate the value of the material?

Once, people watched movies in the theater. The theater today
offers a slightly better viewing experience, but if it were MUCH better, people would emphasize viewing on a theater. The movie industry decided to pass on the viewing experience in hopes that people will watch more movies. They were right, but people don't value each as much. The movie/record industry believes that people should be spending 1000's of dollars on entertainment and that spending rate should be sustained regardless of the capacity of the economy to absorb it.

Gints,

Your suggestions are known as the DRM approach--Digital Rights Management. Granting even an airtight production-to-distribution pipeline--and this is a generous assumption, since most leaks are from industry insiders--it still doesn't prevent imperfect copies of media from being made, by recording from from the analog line-out speaker jack of an audio player, or by pointing a video camera at a screen, for example.

Since we're trying to be forward-thinking in looking for solutions, I think we should try to come up with a way to protect experiential intellectual property (books, music, movies) that will still apply in the year 2100, when we all have multi-exabyte wetware storage chips implanted in our heads that enable us to perfectly recall anything we've ever seen or heard. This might seem like a radical concept to some, but when I was in high school, the idea that I would need only query a database in order to download any song I desired in under a minute was pretty far-fetched, and that was a reality by my first year in college. Since they can't put genies back into bottles, industries whose profits depend on hawking experiential intellectual property would do well to devise solutions that will survive any technological advance.

In answer to your first question, Robert, I would expand the litigation to include 13 and 14 year olds. I have less sympathy for them.

Off with their hand! The Turks did this, and theft was a very rare occurrance. Just make sure it is the mouse hand :)

Off with their ears too! That will teach them...13 and 14 year olds don't need them as they don't listen to anyone anyway.

RB

I think they're going to have to get pretty creative to stop piracy now. Especially the RIAA; I think the MPAA acted fairly quickly with these new 'stop piracy' commercials before movies.. it won't stop pirates, but it might stop a lot of people nonchalantly downloading it at their leisure. The RIAA, however, missed this opportunity. They took far too long to react after Napster came out, and by the time they did it was considered okay for absolutely anybody to download songs.

I think if the RIAA had been forward-thinking enough to realize that this is the new wave of distribution and jump on it - creating their own P2P system with a payment system already in place - they would have eliminated a lot of the people who didn't know any better. It's extremely hard to turn people off music piracy when it's already so easy and widespread. Your grandmother and parents don't pirate software because most of them don't realize they can or how easy it is.

So if the MPAA can at least build some breakwaters to stop would-be pirates, they should do it now. I don't know what the solution is, there really isn't any good one. All they can hope to do is cut down on it, not eliminate it. Much like the war on drugs, but that's another thread!

You cannot and will not end piracy. Whatever technology you create will be cracked before it hits store shelves. If history has shown one thing, there are at least as many bright people on the dark side as there are on the light side. The hundreds of millions of dollars they will waste trying would be better served elsewhere.

The only way to limit piracy is to develop a model that people understand, agree with, and will pay for. We all go see movies, buy CD's and DVD's, as well as books and magazines. There is money to be had, the studios just need to develop the model that suits customers first, and themselves second.

<<<-- Originally posted by Robert Knecht Schmidt : Besides pursuing a campaign of litigation against 12-year-olds?

Ba-da-ching! -->>>

You can allways try a stupidier aproach like they do here in Spain.

The SGAE (which is some kind of Authors Society.. maybe like ASCAP?) they have managed to charge a tax for each optical support (CD-R, DVD, etc..)
I think the tax is about 16 cents of an euro for each hour of "potential" pirated music or video.

The reason of this tax (according to this people) is to compensate the loses due to Piracy... well so I have to pay a tax for music Piracy even though most of my CD-R are recorded with Data, backups or just to have a SVCD copy of MY videos. (My Mp3´s hardly ever leave my PC since I listen to music from my Hard Drive or on Minidiscs. )

Anyways the solution to piracy is not an easy one.. but it´s clear that the industry is not on the right path... since most people I know won´t ever buy a CD for 15€... and very few will never pay 25€ for a DVD...

MY 10 STEP SOLUTION FOR PIRACY (a suggestion to the Industry):

1.- Educate the consumer.
2.- Lower the prices.
3.- Educate the consumer.
4.- Increase quality.
5.- Lower the prices.
6.- Forget about tech-anticopying systems and invest in number 1 and number 3.
7.- Asume that Piracy will be among us forever.
8.- Don´t be afraid of change.... deal with it.
9.- Assume that Internet will offer the "little ones" the oportunity to sell and distribute their creations.. so READ NUMBER 4.
10. - Evolve or Die...
10B- Did I say... LOWER THE PRICES?

>5.- Lower the prices.
>10B- Did I say... LOWER THE PRICES?

Do you think lowering prices really helps anything but volume?
At some price point, the market is enabled. Below some price point, it's not. There is a limit to the purchasing capacity of the consumer. How many pieces of $10-20 shareware have you actually purchased?

> You cannot and will not end piracy.

Piracy stops when it is no longer profitable to pirate. Part of that is lowering prices toward the cost of production. The other part is the consequence/cost of prosecution.

Frederico,

Canada uses the same system of taxing blank media to compensate media producers for the piracy they are assumed in incur. As soon as the law catches up to technology, watch for hard disk storage to be taxed in the same way.

<<<-- Originally posted by Gints Klimanis : > You cannot and will not end piracy.

Piracy stops when it is no longer profitable to pirate. Part of that is lowering prices toward the cost of production. The other part is the consequence/cost of prosecution. -->>>

good example: XM Radio has been hacked, however its not cost effective for the user to hack it because the mod costs more than paying for the service!

<<<-- Originally posted by Gints Klimanis : >5.- Lower the prices.
>10B- Did I say... LOWER THE PRICES?

Do you think lowering prices really helps anything but volume?
At some price point, the market is enabled. Below some price point, it's not. There is a limit to the purchasing capacity of the consumer. How many pieces of $10-20 shareware have you actually purchased? -->>>

I have never bought shareware (I´m not sure if Fruity Loops is shareware.. but I did buy that one).

I´ve never found shareware with enough Quality for me to spend even $20. But I Use OpenOffice and a lot of freeware software (mainly audio stuff) with the same or even better quality than most sharewares and even some Full Price software.

So here goes number 4. Increase quality.. then Lower the prices and we are talking.

I don´t pay for pirated music... I buy a few CD´s a year then exchange with friends.. I´ve done with Vinyl and Tapes since I was 9 and CD didn´t exist... and I will keep doing it until I die or go to jail or become deaf...

The thing is.. that If CD´s didn´t cost 15€.. but 10 or 8.. I would buy 15 to 20 Cds a year instead of 5 to 10.
Then my friend will also buy more Cd´s.. and now multiply firends of friends.. and there you go... besides.. it´s probable that many of the Cds I buy are also bought by my friends.. thus there is one less copied Cd around..

I like my Original.. I like to have the "Magazine"... maybe this is just me (and about a dozen of my friends) but I still think that lowering the prices is one of the strategies to follow... of course it´s not THE ONLY solution.. It has to be linked with Educating the consumer, or whatever...

But then again... read my signature.