SOPA & Piracy

If you are someone that suffers from Piracy then make your system easier to use then someone trying to pirate it. Most people are more then willing to pay for things if the service is easy to use and well priced. We have seen this with iTunes, Spotify, Steam and Netflix, plus many other services . Even Louis CK released “Live at then Beacon Theater” for $5 with no DRM and he made over a Million Dollars in a few days. More then he has ever made in one go.

I could go on about other things like people having to pirate a game because retail version of it had embeded DRM that broke it forcing people to Piracy just to be able to play the game they paid for, but I will be here all day giving examples.

There has been so many things come out that the Mass Media Industry said would kill them. But it has never happen. They need to learn and move with the times. They need to accept their old ways of doing things will just not work anymore. They need to adapt and re-think their pricing. They are still charging the same price for data for something that needs to be made and manufactured (CD’s/DVD’s ect.)

The Humble Indie Bundle asked people to pay what they feel and have made a huge amount of money. Also Radiohead and a few other people have done “pay what you feel” and done well. Louis CK calls it an impulse buy. He said he knew he got a lot more buys because he priced it at $5. And I agree (I was one of them). Sellers will get a lot more people buying something if its cheap/well priced. People are not dumb. They know that sending data cost the seller very little compared to something that is manufactured. People will not spend a huge amount of money for data so sellers need to price online content accordingly.

Also lets be honest here. A lot of things that get heavily pirated are things that have low ratings. It things people don’t want to risk paying to much money on in-case it’s something they don’t want. Most people that I know that have downloaded something that was pirated end up buying it if they enjoyed it. So actually many things that do end up being pirated get customers sellers wouldn’t of had in the first place. They would of just skipped on the purchase.

Piracy is also a good thing. TV shows For an example. TV shows that don’t get aired in the UK/EU, have bad air times and no one watched them, or old canceled shows. People that would be interested in them would have to risk paying for the DVD’s before even watching them. Letting people pirate TV Shows gives grater chance of increased DVD sells of the show. I know Arrested Development and Archer had an extra Box-Set sell because of this.

We got a long way to go, and we will see a lot of these legislates pop up along the way. Once the Internet is safe and secure from the Mass Media then they will be forced to rethink how they do business. Until then we face the Internet getting destroyed just because there is a bit of Piracy on it.

Piracy is an issue but its mainly done by poor people and children. People that would never buy the product anyway.