On the one hand, Rupert Murdoch. When the Obama administration objected to
granting the authorities power to make offending websites disappear (“domain
name system blocking”), Murdoch tweeted this grotesque exaggeration: “Obama
has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters.”
Then you have the operators of The Pirate Bay file-sharing website. They offer
the childish bragthat because they don’t actually store stolen content, it
is “not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible” for
stealing. Someone, please lock these people in a room together.
There is agreement on one point. Content producers need to make it easier for
consumers to be legitimate customers. How well this will work depends on the
type of content.
A solution is already at hand for older, or “tail”, video content: Netflix
makes money and writes big cheques to movie and TV studios. The revenues of
the music industry have shrunk by half during the past decade, but a recent
resurgence in sales volumes shows that services such as iTunes and Spotify
are helping.
Apple
Software is a harder case. Apple makes its software harder to steal by
bundling it up with fancy hardware, but even it has to spend loads of time
and money suing suspected infringers. High-cost, high-end content, like
first-run movies and live sporting events, may be the hardest case of all.
There is no economic law promising that a valuable and productive business,
however clever and forward-thinking, will be able to protect itself when
thieves provide free or cheap access to its products.
Keeping a lid on piracy is likely to become a lot like garbage pick-up, or
stopping drink-driving: an endless effort against a perennial problem, where
some degree of government involvement is inevitable.
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