Full Spectrum: piracy talk stalemate
Summary: Talks between rights holders and ISPs on how best to reduce online copyright infringement appears to have reached a stalemate.
Loading... Please wait.Talks between rights holders and internet service providers (ISPs), on how best to reduce online copyright infringement, appear to have reached a stalemate.
At least, that's how iiNet's chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby sees it. Content lobby groups like the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) aren't interested in making content available quicker, easier and cheaper, he said, they just want the government to change the law. So while the government is still holding meetings between the groups, hoping for a voluntary industry policy, Dalby said that AFACT won't budge and the ISPs aren't interested in meeting content owner's demands.
In the meantime, although AFACT's managing director Neil Gane reportedly described the new season of Game of Thrones as having a "mere eight-day delay" from airing in the US to commercial availability in Australia, it will still go down as the most-infringed TV show this year, if not all time.
If eight days is close enough, does this lend weight to Gane's theory that — unlike the bottled water industry before it — content owners can't compete with free?
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Talkback
It doesn't matter whether it's eight days or eight months, the consumers are saying they don't like it, to the point where they are switching across to a competitor, in their millions.
Additionally it's not eight days, it's eight days times 10 episodes (or whatever) so the frustration is experienced by the consumer on many occasions over many weeks. It is not a one-off event.
The studios know this, they just don't care, otherwise they'd do something about it.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/11/gabe-newell-piracy-is-a-non-issue-for-our-company/
In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of [their] personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty.
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. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe.