Are New Content Distribution Models the Potential Answer to Internet Piracy?
By Rob Scott
August 7, 2012
August 7, 2012
- “Stopping online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole,” suggests The New York Times. “Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow.”
- The article cites workarounds to several attempts of copyright protection to illustrate how battling piracy is often futile.
- For example, when YouTube launched Content ID for movie studios and TV networks to legitimately upload copyrighted clips, YouTube users placed the videos inside a still photo of a cat that fooled the Content ID algorithm.
- When authorities blocked access to BitTorrent site Pirate Bay earlier this year, whacking one big mole led to hundreds of smaller ones.
- “In retaliation, the Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire Web site, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers,” explains NYT. “People began setting up hundreds of new versions of the site, and the piracy continues unabated.”
- Ernesto Van Der Sar, editor of Torrent Freak, says piracy will not go away and recommends that rather than attempting to combat it, companies should be experimenting with new content distribution models.
- “There’s a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it’s an inverse relationship,” says Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. “The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online.”
- “If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement,” he adds. “But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money.”
No Comments Yet
You can be the first to comment!
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.