Dr David Price told technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that many people turn to piracy
because officially-sanctioned songs or TV programmes are of poor
quality, arrive late or come with restrictions that make them hard
to access.
Price is the head of piracy intelligence at Envisional, a
company which monitors piracy for content producers.
"There have to be legitimate alternatives, and not just that but
they have to be really good legitimate alternatives," he said.
"You've got to offer as good a user experience legitimately as
people can get through piracy. We can't just offer something that
is so restricted that people aren't going to bother."
Price said that many users of piracy services would happily
switch to legitimate ones but are attracted by the more usable,
more readily-available pirated services.
"Once you get involved in downloading things illegitimately the
user experience is so good it's compelling," he said. "You really
get high quality content, there are so many advantages to doing it
over what you can get legitimately in a wide range of
countries."
Companies should learn from pirates, said Price, and embrace
some of the methods of distribution they use. He said that
Norwegian broadcaster NRK achieved impressive results when it
seeded peer-to-peer networks with legitimate copies of one of its
hit programmes.
"Because [people] were coming to the network, the network's
whole traffic to the website went up. People were downloading other
shows from them, people were watching other things from them and
there was a big effect from simply offering that good quality
content," said Price.
Companies would not have to give up on revenue to compete with
pirates, Price said. They could earn money through advertising.
"It's not necessarily about paying. Something like [legal online
TV service] Hulu is funded by advertising. You don't have to pay to
use Hulu; almost all the major television networks' content is
available on Hulu, or if it's not available on Hulu it's available
on their own website," he said.
A large number of the users of pirated content could easily be
converted by making material more easily and quickly accessible,
said Price, but he admitted that there would always be people who
used pirated content and made it available.
They should not be targeted individually, he said, but sites
which make it easier for users to gain access to pirated material
should be the subject of legal action, he said.
"We have always advised against targeting individuals, I've
never seen a value in going after those people, it comes off as
vindictive, it comes off as mean," he said. "But on the other side
I think there is a great value in taking action against the large
facilitators."
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