Why do we still have digital piracy?

Jamie Thunder
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

Digital piracy is, in theory, not a particularly difficult regulatory problem to solve. At its heart, it’s a problem of the misuse of a network (the network being the internet). I expect that the emergence of video-on-demand sites and streaming services like Spotify have, or will, reduce piracy quite significantly, but it’s interesting that this is a market solution, not a regulatory one.

If I were asked to come up with a set of regulatory proposals to reduce digital piracy, they’d look something like:

Give the network the responsibility

Sites that host, or through which a a user accesses, pirated content will have particular characteristics. These might be:

  • Sites that host large video files or large numbers of audio files
  • Newly-registered domain names, or domain names reporting new levels of activity (e.g. if it was registered as an ‘insurance’ domain that is now necessary)
  • Domain names with certain words or phrases (various streaming sites just change their extensions as they get caught, e.g. to different country codes)
  • Sites where users watch video content for a period of time that just so happens to match with TV run-times
  • Sites where users download large .zip or .rar files

Of course, a site that meets these characteristics is not necessarily enabling piracy. But if networks had the responsibility to identify sites that meet these characteristics, and prioritise those sites for investigation (either themselves to block them, and/or by reporting to law enforcement), these sites would be much more quickly identified and much more effectively taken down or blocked.

Pirates would react to this. But these reactions would either inconvenience the pirates (e.g. they might upload videos of random lengths, or artifically extend the length of videos) or the users (e.g. it might be harder to find a site’s new address, or they might have to use a VPN etc). The networks’ understanding of what constitutes a ‘risky’ site would need to evolve as well.

Go after the funding

Piracy needs money. Make it an offence to advertise on a website used for piracy (and some do, especially gambling sites), and you’d choke off the source of funding as firms started panicking. Pirates might then either take a financial hit (if they’re really committed) and/or start getting dodgier and dodgier adverts, which would eventually put users off for fear of getting a virus.

These measures wouldn’t (and wouldn’t be intended to) end digital piracy. But it would be increasingly difficult for pirates to continue to operate, and for people to access the content: both would have to jump through more hoops.

So why is it not solved? Why haven’t film companies or music labels heaped pressure on politicians and telecoms networks to take these sorts of actions? [UPDATE — over on Facebook someone points out that releasing media simultaneously worldwide could also stop a fair chunk of piracy; it’s also interesting that this hasn’t happened] I can think of a few possible reasons.

One might be the difficulty of cross-border enforcement activity: it might be difficult to get good information on the contents of servers in Russia or China, and the will or ability to take enforcement action in those coutnries might also be lacking. But this shouldn’t stop measures being taken at the user-end, e.g. in the UK or USA.

A second reason is that people often focus on the wrong bit of a network problem: they focus on stopping the harmful activity itself (or the susceptibility of victims to the activity), rather than giving the network responsibility. This is never going to be that effective: you’re trying to reach (to punish/deter or to educate) millions of people, rather than a far, far smaller number of network operators. Policemen do this in relation to scams, media companies in relation to piracy, and MPs in relation to abuse on Twitter. In each case there are better solutions that recognise that this is a network problem, with less gigantic downsides than draconian individual penalties for filesharing, people continuing to lose their life savings to fraudsters, or Twitter being unusable for anyone who, for legitimate reasons of personal safety or job security, wants to be anonymous.

The third, and most interesting, possible reason is that there might be some truth to the argument — often made by supporters of piracy — that piracy does actually help the artist or the label, or the studio or the actors etc. The argument goes that pirating content allows potential customers to try out the content, and makes them more likely to buy a band’s future albums, or to see them live, to eventually buy a TV package that includes the programme, or to buy merchandise about a film etc (it is probably weakest for films, as many don’t have much tie-in stuff, and even if you discover an actor you love, you don’t have a comparable ability to ‘see them live’ as you do musicians. You’ll just pirate more of their films).

Now, if that argument were true, wouldn’t record labels offer free content as a ‘teaser’? The problem there is that they need some way to offer free content to some people without it being available to everyone for free (or they make no money).

So they want to allocate the free content. And I wonder whether not cracking down hard on piracy (while carrying on with the occasional ineffectual prosecution of an individual, to stop it getting too out of hand) might be the allocation mechanism: it allocates it to those who are willing and know how to pirate stuff.

It’s entirely possible, of course, that it’s cock-up not conspiracy: maybe people are just bad at solving network problems. But ‘piracy as an allocation mechanism’ is at least an interesting alternative explanation for why it’s so easy to watch the new series of Game of Thrones.

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