Who’s to blame for online piracy?
If digital streaming has made media more accessible, why is illegal downloading still so pervasive?
Australia is one of the world’s largest online pirating countries where over 50% of the population engage in online piracy.
The suspicion that people pirate content because they don’t want to pay money is perhaps a fallacy.
For example, in Australia, evidence shows a strong correlation between the rise in online piracy and increases in household income.
It seems that the impetus to pirate goes beyond economic factors and is driven by 2 main reasons:
1. Content restrictions & lack of choice
We have an oversaturated music streaming market with major players like Spotify and Apple Music serving to reduce music piracy through unlimited access to music from around the world with nominal content restrictions. While the TV market remains comparatively stagnant with few differentiated players and with content restrictions and limited variety on platforms like Netflix and Hulu, it is hard to captivate audiences.
2. Geographical limitations
Furthermore, given Australia’s geographical location and rigorous copyright laws, there is often a significant delay in the airing of our favourite TV shows. Technology has conditioned us to demand instant gratification, so we turn to illegal downloading as a means of contemporaneously accessing our favourite shows.
Provided that the majority of pirating is done for reasons outside of financial motivations, piracy should be viewed less as a moral debate
Rather than expecting audiences to be more ‘ethical’, the focus should be on the forces causing people to illegally download — of which, I believe there are 3 key factors that continue to perpetuate the cycle of online piracy but are generally overlooked.
1. Lack of innovation in streaming platforms
Music streaming services, like Spotify, have added value through curated personalised playlists and endless content libraries, which remove the temptation to download illegally. A modernised business model in music streaming has successfully monetised a listener’s consumption of music, so everyone wins. In TV and film, Netflix is an isolated example of a value added streaming service that has commissioned its own shows like Orange is the New Black, thereby successfully encouraging audiences to its platform. However, the vast majority of streaming platforms (like Hulu) are much less innovative, merely serving as a library of limited content. If the TV & film industries do not start providing a truly unique product proposition, they will do little to curb illegal downloading.
2. Insufficient recognition of audiences (particularly loyal fans)
Additionally, new revenue streams leveraging off modern day media consumption are often purposely blocked. For example, the Australian Pay-TV service Foxtel, continues to monopolise content and recently re-signed a contract with HBO ensuring content is restricted across all other platforms. It becomes less of an ethical debate when loyal fans (who have largely contributed to the show’s success) have to resort to illegal downloading because all other legal avenues have been blocked. It’s safe to say that in an age of transnational digital streaming, restricting access to content is not the answer especially when Australia topped the world in the number of illegal Game of Thrones downloads.
3. New opportunities for alternative revenue streams are being ignored
Beyond media companies blocking revenue streams, they are also ignoring low hanging fruit. The entertainment industry needs to reward fans and learn to monetise fandom. More can be done to capitalise on a loyal fan base with ongoing touch points with a TV show’s brand — through webisodes or gamification (for example, puzzles that fans need to crack to reveal new content).
While we want to protect our artists, outdated copyright laws serve no one. Financial considerations drive condemnation of online piracy but production houses need to understand new media use as a means of economic benefit. With media moguls like Jeff Bewkes (CEO of Time Warner) publicly acknowledging that the success of his show, Game of Thrones, is largely attributed to online piracy, perhaps this marks the start of a new era. It is only a matter of time before media companies look beyond traditional advertising channels to capitalise on audience engagement across multiple mediums. Inevitably this would include monetising illegal downloading thus ensuring all parties benefit, in turn, making it no longer unethical or taboo.
