Star Warsisn’t on Netflix Instant,Blockbuster’s dead, and DVDs take a week in the mail.But unlicensedstreaming is just a click away. The solution obvious: make your own, better streaming.
Have you pirated a movie in, say, the last year? If the answer’s yes, ask yourself if it was because you’re too cheap to buy it or if it’s because torrents are the easiest way to find a copy ofStar Wars. According to a new piracy study funded by NBCUniversal, it appears that a lot of pirates are downloading movies as a matter of convenience.
The report published by NetNamessurveysthe downloading of copyright-infringing content in January of this year. As you might expect from a report titled “Sizing the piracy universe,” the opening stats are the big ones. The report states that “across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, 327 million unique internet users explicitly sought infringing content during January 2013. This figure represents 25.9 percentof the total internet user population in these three regions.”
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It follows up with a couple other major states, saying that 23.8 percent of all bandwidth on those previous regions is dedicated to downloading infringing content, and that “worldwide,432 million unique internet users explicitly sought infringing content during January 2013.”
Taken at face value,the numbers show just what the MPAA and RIAA have trumpeted for years: Piracy is a huge part of the internet. Of course, there’s very good reason to doubt those numbers.The report also notes that internet usage is growing rapidly, which meansthere will be evenmorepiracy in the future. Again, not surprising, and may indeed provetrue.
The report states that bandwidth used for infringement has grown 159.3 percent since 2010—an interesting statistic, as it could simply mean more people are downloading higher-quality movies with larger file sizes, rather than more movies as a whole. It also states that from November 2011 to January 2013, the number of using seeking out infringing content grew by9.9 percent. And while it notes more people are using streaming sites, it appears BitTorrent usage has remained pretty steady.
The value of this report is in the details, and not for the reasons you’d think.The report states that infringement is “tenacious and persistent,” and that efforts to combat piracy by shutting down websites largely haven’t worked. The report specifically states that the shutdown ofMegaUploadwas successful in “limiting the attractiveness” of download lockers, but it also notes unequivocally that such efforts have not slowed piracy as a whole.
Why is piracy so hard to stop? The report lays it out clearly (emphasis theirs):
Online piracy reacts quickly to system events such as site closures or seizures. User behaviour is modified, often inmoments, shifting from locations or arenas impacted by events to others that offer a comparable spread of infringingcontent via a similar or different consumption model. The practise of piracy morphs to altered circ*mstances: asdirect download cyberlockers fell in popularity, use of video streaming and bittorrent escalated.
In other words, efforts to simply eradicate piracy by shutting down sites can’t work. The internet moves too quickly, and has unlimited space for infringing sites to hide. This is a very strong admission for an industry-funded report, and one that shows the extrajudicial DNS blocking that SOPA would allow can’t work. Never mind the censorship concerns—killing websites that host infringing material, unwittingly or not, won’t kill piracy.
That on its own runs counter to the prevailing refrain in the copyright lobby. But what’s even more surprising is that the report offers an actual solution, asTechdirt adroitly pointed out: If you want to combat piracy, make your content available elsewhere. Look at this table from page 27 of the report:
It shows total bandwidth usage for various sites worldwide, with content portals dominating the web. (Surprise!) Now compare the use of BitTorrent in countries where Netflix and iTunes don’t have much presence—or licensing rights—to North America. See a difference? Netflix, which costs actual money and pays some of that money to copyright holders, isfarmore popular than pirating. iTunes is certainly behind, but its non-negligible presence shows that easy-to-use, legal outlets for buying and using content are indeed quite popular.
This makes total sense. Netflix killed the video rental industry by making movies easier to watch; it’s also easier to use than BitTorrent, which involves downloading huge files onto your laptop, waiting for them to finish, and then figuring out how to get that video on your TV. It’s better pretty much all around, which is why people prefer it to pirating video.
But what’s the major problem with Netflix? It doesn’t have nearly enough movies on it. Back to theStar Warsthing: Where do I go if I want to watch the bajillion-dollar trilogy?By virtue of trying to avoid streaming licensing deals as much as possible, old blockbusters—and countless other films—are hard to find and watch. You certainly can’t rent them anywhere, as RedBox’sselection is lacking. Amazon remains the best non-streaming route, and it comes with a wait. I tried buying DVDs at my local Best Buy recently, and they pretty much offered jack sh*t.
The last resort is piracy. I don’t advocate infringing copyright, and the solution to quelling it seems obvious. People have no problem paying money for things they want to see, but when the option is wait for a DVD in the mail or pirate something in an hour, a whole lot of people will choose the later. (Many, I suspect, just pick a different option that’s available to stream on Netflix.) If media conglomerates aretrulystressed about copyright infringement, they’d put more effort into making their content available—for real money!—on more platforms. But that’s just not happening.
