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.

Free Content - Part 1

I recently had a conversation with several coworkers and we talked about the new anti-piracy legislation that seems to have been put on hold by Congress. On one hand, Hollywood wants to protect their movies, and on the other, Silicon Valley doesn't want censorship, which is what they felt was happening. This brought up a very interesting discussion.

When computers first came out, there was little to keep friends and family from sharing software with each other. If you had a program your friend wanted, simply make a copy of it and he had it too. Then software companies came up with anti-piracy methods to keep this from happening. After all, why should software developers miss out on lost revenue from software pirates.

Then the Compact Disk or CD was developed. The deterrent that kept people from copying and sharing music was the massive size of one single song. Twenty years ago, 75 megabytes was huge and that only got you a single song. Back then, a 100 megabyte hard drive was considered massive. Eventually better compression techniques were created and the size of disk drives increased. Gigabyte hard drives emerged and MP3s shrunk the size of a song to around 5 megabytes. Then the same problem the software industry faced years earlier, plagued music companies. Their solution was to litigate. Sites like Napster were shut down and several high-profile offenders were slapped with huge fines and threats of jail. Unfortunately the music companies were not nearly as effective as software companies and stolen music continues to be a problem.

Now we face the same issue with movies and Hollywood isn't too happy with the music industry's success. Hard drives have continued to increase capacity to the point where countless movies can be stored on even the most basic laptop. The movie industry has enough trouble making profitable films and they don't want to loose any potential revenue. So what is their solution? Lobby Congress to enact tougher laws regarding copyrighted material. This includes creating a new police force, which is made up of Internet service providers (ISPs). Furthermore, anyone can claim a copyright which could force ISPs to suspend service to anyone with a false claim against them. If you don't like the content found on a website, claim it is yours and force the ISP to remove it. Then wait for the court system to churn through all of the false claims, which takes a lot of time.

So that is how we got to this point. What do we do now?