In which I make an unsubstantiated claim, to see what y'all think of it.

[xiphias]

A thought for your consideration: online piracy is about convenience, not primarily money, unless the amount of money is so high that it becomes an actual barrier.

If it is easier and more convenient to get content illegally, people will do so. If it is easier and more convenient to get it legally, people will do that. And, for the most part, "reasonable" prices don't count as an inconvenience.

I contend, without any evidence, that iTunes did more to stop file sharing than RIAA lawsuits ever could. It's just easier to spend 99 cents to download a song easily and conveniently than it is to get it through a Napster-like service.

Movies and TV shows are pirated when they are released at different times around the world. If a Doctor Who episode comes out, but won't be released in the United States for another six months to a year, people will Bittorrent it, because they don't want to wait six months. However, if it's available legally at the same time, it's just easier to get it THAT way.

If the MPAA and RIAA want to stop online piracy, they should make their material available for sale simultaneously everywhere, and at a price people want to pay. The existence of significant online piracy is a sign that, primarily, they are preventing easy legal access to the material, or, possibly, that they are charging prices that the market won't support.

But more the first than the second.

Comments

[sethg]

Gabe Newell, cofounder of Valve, agrees with you.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market.... [T]he people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia.... So that, as far as we’re concerned, is asked and answered. It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

"One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates."

Apropos of that, is this image (which I think is exactly right): http://imjustcreative.posterous.com/experience-of-dvd-pirate-vs-paying-customer