How to sell to a pirate
Paul Battley, to the media industries:
- There is no point in putting restrictions on the sale of the legal copy, because your free competitor has the same product.
- When you region-code the product, you prevent me from buying it.
- When you don’t sell the product in my territory, you prevent me from buying it.
- When you put DRM on the product, you prevent me from using it on the device of my choice. I don’t want to be locked into buying Apple products forever, for example. And that prevents me from buying it.
- There’s no point in putting DRM or other restrictions on the product, because it’s already available. Give me commonly-accepted formats in a choice of bitrates. What’s the worst that can happen? I upload it to Usenet? It’s already there!
He also makes the point that:
Even though it’s free, pirating stuff is still a bit of a hassle. You [the media industry] could definitely beat them [the pirates] on convenience and speed of release.
Although you know what? The media industry had better get its act together quickly: the options for piracy are only getting simpler and easier.
I linked to Paul Battley’s post earlier on Twitter, but it’s worth re-sharing. The killer here is that the music industry already made these mistakes and took well over a decade to begin to learn from them—even now it’s struggling to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t in control of the market in the same way that it used to be.
The TV industry has had restricted bandwidth on its side for a while, but, as Andy points out, time is fast running out. And yet, despite the huge head start and ample opportunities to observe the other creative industries, it’s still doing what the music industry did, beginning with the wild claims which make for neat soundbites on BBC News.
