Free Content - Part 2

My last posting provided a little history about how we went from software pirates to music pirates and now to movie pirates. Congress has proposed legislation to help curb this piracy, but is has been put on hold for the time being. This brings up the question: Is legislation the answer? In a nutshell, no.

If you look at the software and music industries, enacting new laws didn't really help. A combination of enforcing existing laws coupled with simple technological advances like software licensing keys had the largest success for the software industry. As for music, piracy just went underground. The same will happen with movies.

Talking with one of my co-workers exposed a mindset of the younger generation that was new to me. He expressed that teenagers and young adults expect certain things to be free. If you look at the software industry, open source is a large movement that gains more and more projects every day. The same thing is happening with music. If you look at iTunes, they constantly have the free song of the week. There are also bands that make their music freely available from their websites. One would think this would kill innovation. I personally believe it has the opposite effect. If you are a commercial software company and put out a sub-standard product, there is an open source project that your customers can replace you with. That means your product had better be good enough that people will pay money for it. I see the same thing happening with music.

So what is the solution for Hollywood? My suggestion would be to embrace the Internet and don't try to litigate or legislate it. Use it as a new medium for distributing your products. While fewer people are interested in actually buying DVDs, more people are interested in streaming movies from places like Netflix. Think about it. If you don't have to create a DVD and ship it somewhere, you shouldn't have to charge nearly as much, but still be able to make the same amount of profit.

Unfortunately movies are not the end of free content. Today I saw a prototype of a new electronics device created on a 3D printer. It is only a matter of time before you will be able to download plans from the Internet and create your own Ferrari. Let's see Congress try to figure out how to legislate that one.