Piracy: the clear choice for 2006
p2pnet.net news views:- An unusual meeting of the minds has taken place: Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney and The Inquirer’s Charlie Demerjian firmly agree on something.
Ladies first, and Anne sums it up like this: “It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand.”
And Charlie puts it like this: “Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution to the disk format wars”.
Ann is talking about the moving picture arts. And so is Charlie. But where Ms Sweeney is very product specific Demerjian has a lot more in mind, also lighting into Microsoft, Intel (”they started out as MS’s bitch “), Sony (but of course) Blu-Ray, and HD-TV.
But they both wind up with the same conclusion.
‘Piracy’ is where it’s at.
Sweeney encapsulated a (the?) “defining moment for the business” to an enthralled audience of Hollywood losers and fakers at Mipcom 2006. .
“We understand now that piracy is a business model,” Sweeney told them unequivocally. “It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do – through quality, price and availability. We we don`t like the model but we realise it`s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”
Indeed, and in The Inquirer, at the end of an item sub-headed “A clear victor emerges,” Demerjian says, “Piracy, the better choice ™ flourishes,” going on:
If you take 10 minutes to look around, you will see that every HD movie is now available on P2P networks. I haven’t bothered to get one, so I can’t comment on the quality, but it sure looks like availability is there. What was an underground clique in the 1980s and 1990s has become mainstream and so vastly much easier to do that it is laughable. Before the technology hits 1% market penetration it is comprehensively cracked and better for the consumer than the legit versions.
The lawsuits, threats, purchased governance and stern speeches could not prevent the children of Warner Music from pirating, the less moneyed masses are a lost cause. (Funny how he wasn’t sued though, kind of makes you wonder…) As of right now, anyone can get any music or movie they want, for free, much more easily than they can through legal DRM infected channels. Piracy, the better choice ™.
If you try and purchase any of this content, you descend into a DRM nightmare of incompatibility and legal mires. Your monitor will not work with your Blu-Ray drive because your PC decided that a wobble bit was set wrong. You just pissed away $6K on a player, media center PC and HD TV for nothing, you lose. The Warner CEOs kids have a nice new car to play their pirated CDs in though.
On the other hand, if you downloaded that content, in HD no less, you save the $1000 on the Blu-Ray player, $30 on the movie, and it works seamlessly out of the box. The available content is much higher with piracy, and it is quite on-demand. You don’t need to sign up, give them your details to be sold to marketers who call during dinner and spam you, you just get the content you want, when you want, how you want. There is no iTunes/Plays for (not) Sure incompatibility, it just works. Piracy, the better choice(tm).
On the down side, the RIAA/MPAA/PATSY/TOOLBOY have sued probably 10,000 people now, and each ’settlement’ is, well lets just use $5000 for the sake of round numbers. Now, the conservative estimates of P2P usage was around 30 million people, but I am pretty damn sure that is far lower than the actual usage. Last time I saw anything serious, it was 35M and growing fast. Lets just assume that it is now 50M users.
10,000 * $5,000 = $50,000,000. The net cost to each P2P user, assuming everyone out there settles is $1. To look at it another way, if you look at it in the worst case light, you have a 1 in 5000 chance of getting nailed. A lot of people buy lottery tickets with far far worse odds than that, and spend more than $5000 doing so every few years. To be even more cynical, hands up everyone who personally knows someone who got sued by the RIAA. Now, hands up everyone who knows someone who downloaded music or movies. Any guesses which one is bigger? Piracy, the better choice ™.
What do we end up with? A year or more where the CE industry pushed, pulled, legislated and litigated their way to obscurity. Along the way, they killed yet another promising consumer technology, well 5 or 6 actually, and made Intel and AMD their bitches. We all were on the verge of losing this format and DRM infection war until a dark horse champion emerged to snatch victory from the jaws of evil. Piracy, the better choice(tm).
Stay tuned ;P
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
defining moment – Hollywood lauds pirates, October 10, 2006
The Inquirer – HD disk format wars are over, December 23, 2006
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