The No-Win situation of Modern Internet Piracy

First of all, I’d like to clarify that as it pertains to this argument, I refer to piracy as this notion of listening/watching/installing content without compensating those that developped the work.

What I’d like to introduce to this argument is this idea of “access.” Today, we have a situation whereby people have much more access than their financial means permits. This in turns signifies that people are exposed to much more art, much more entertainment, and much more creativity software than would otherwise be possible.

Therein lies the flaw of the current anti-piracy pursuits. Either the industry is expecting for people to reduce their access – expose themselves to less music, avoid using creativity software – or they’re expecting people to pay more. Both of these are inherently unrealistic goals.

And so it seems like the only reasonable expectation is more access for the same amount of money. Now with music, you might explain this off as redistribution of funds. The same amount of money goes in, but what changes is how many people get it. In doing so, however, you are devaluating the worth of these items.

To make the point more clear: think of Adobe Premiere. This is a very expensive piece of software, for which there is no decent free/cheap alternative. What this means is that if people don’t have it, or some equivalent, then they can’t do video editing. It’s simply outside their means. However, if you expect them to sell it for less, then you’re hurting Adobe’s bottom line. It will hinder their ability to produce future software, just as illicitly downloading music would hurt a band’s ability to make more music.

For Adobe, that $1000 price point represents maximum profitability. Though more people would purchase it if it were $59, those numbers would still represent less profits than that $1000 mark. The reason being of course that all these professional companies can afford to pay the $1000, and that offsets gains by appealing to the interests of students and the general populace. A hit to that bottom line, however, will ultimately hurt Adobe and thus the economy.

So no matter what happens, it’s a loose-loose situation. As it stands, the war on piracy is the industry trying to cut off that access to match what it was in the pre-filesharing days. Cut off kids from listening to Led Zepplin for the first time; and cut off amateurs from dipping their toes in the world of computer-aided creativity. It’s too easy to say that those companies “should adapt to the Internet age”, because if you’re going that route, then you’re excusing this economically-hurtful activity.

There is no easy way out. More access for less money is not a reasonable expectation. If you go that route, you hurt the economy – and thus culture. If you don’t go that route, you’re cutting off access – and thus culture.

It should be noted that this question of access is somewhat of an unfair conundrum to hand down to the industry – for without the prevalence of this kind of piracy, it wouldn’t exist at all. The question now becomes should it be ignored entirely, now that it is here. Does that even matter, given the irrelevance of this kind of argument in the face of those who reduced spending due to piracy.

Thus concludes the ramblings of a disgruntled student.