Unenforceable Crimes: Digital Piracy

We have a huge problem in this country, and the world in general. We have an almost pathological need to create laws that are not only unenforceable, but they are so-called "victimless crimes." Provided I have a bit of dedication, this is what might be the first of several bits on these Victimless Crimes/Unenforceable Laws.

Unenforceable: Digital Piracy

The recent actions of the Swedish government in prosecuting some of the founding members of The Pirate Bay was one of the most ludicrous things in modern history. Pirates, digital or otherwise, have been mostly underground with brief exceptions for those semi-mainstream piracy sites and publicity blitzes like occurred with OiNK and Napster. With this one, the MPAA certainly shot itself in the foot by creating a massive wave of publicity for something that, to be frank, only nerds cared about. This is symptomatic of a larger problem, as are the laws that led to the trial in the first place.

The problem is that the crimes being prosecuted are, fundamentally, unenforceable. Worse, the laws that make these events crimes were drawn up by the same people who cannot develop a new sustainable business model in the face of exciting new technological opportunities. The laws are stupid because the people who lobbied for them are stupid, the people who wrote them are stupid, the people who voted for them are uneducated, and the courts that foolishly enforce them are criminal in their own way. Naturally, this all goes back to the industry that lobbied for their laws to protect their profit margins. This is normally a reasonable proposition, but in this case it's not because an actual product has been stolen, rather simply that the vendor has lost control of the most efficient distribution method.

In the case of the MPAA, losing control over distribution is roughly equivalent to the death of their industry, or so those people who run the companies that make up that organization would have you believe. It seems the MPAA and it's musical cousin, the RIAA, have yet to catch up to the lessons they've had over a decade to learn. In fact, these lessons probably should have been learned the day that recordable magnetic tape became affordable to the average consumer.

Newspapers are dying because they are only a distribution method for information. Paper is inefficient, requires transportation, hand delivery, and requires many other complex logistical problems to be solved for it to be a viable distribution method. The internet ignores all of these problems, provides a cheaper vector, but also much higher demands for up-to-the-minute content and perfectionist standards bordering on obscenity. With newspapers, however, we can see that they are now being forced to adopt business models where the internet is becoming their main distribution medium, and the print format exists to fill a different purpose.

The MPAA and RIAA have dropped the ball. They attempted to circumvent the problem of piracy by pointless litigation, pressing charges, pushing through new laws and trying to pimp their silly concept of "Digital Rights Management" to the masses, all of which have resulted in a horrible backlash. They could have been focusing on retooling their business models, but instead they've left others to do it for them, all of whom are doing very well.

The future of music distribution is blip.fm, it's myspace, it's last.fm, it's pandora. Since recorded music became popular it has been a primarily viral art form. One person hums a song and it gets stuck in everyone's head. Once upon a time local radio stations did that, then it became MTV, now it's people's myspace profiles or last.fm suggestions. The record companies will die, without question, because a recording studio is no longer necessary to make a great fucking record. A record itself is no longer relevant for that matter, but it will stick around as an art form. The smarter bands have all figured out that they don't need a record company taking a substantial portion of their income to do promoting, to front recording costs, and to do distribution. They need a website, a myspace profile, clever merchandise, and relentless touring. This is as it should be.

The record companies can't keep up with the likes of iTunes and myspace, so they are doomed to die. The future of music is much like its past, in ticket and merchandise sales, but most certainly not in record sales. Truthfully, the fact that a band could write a great album and spend the rest of their life living off of the royalties was quite an anomaly.

The film and television industry is in a different pickle. The product they produced was designed soley for the distribution method that it utilized. Video game sales are on pace to dramatically outperform television and film in the near future. TiVO and similar technologies are killing advertising slowly but surely, and almost all of the shows that are making money are short-run serials on cable television, many of them on premium networks.

Props to HBO, they figured out which way the wind was blowing all the way back in the VHS days. They are the model of the future, though I don't suspect cable, satellite, or broadcast television are going to be relevant at all in a decade or so.

The film industry (again, ticket sales) will likely survive, but the television part of that same industry is going to have to undergo a dramatic restructering to ensure its survival. The idea of Home Video sales was a unique one only slightly more than two decades ago. That market quickly overtook theater ticket sales and even spread to re-releasing old television shows. A billion dollar industry that piracy already existed in from its very inception.

The MPAA would have you believe that people downloading shaky cam rips from a movie theater or a DVDRip of some recently released movie are killing their profits. What the MPAA would have you believe is that, as a consumer, you ignored the past 20 years and never had a copied VHS of a movie you liked, and that you don't go to the theater to experience the huge screen, amazing sound system, and experience of seeing a movie with the crowd. The MPAA is full of shit, and even they know it.

The MPAA is angry, and the television studios with them, that a huge part of their revenue stream is withering up because new revenue streams in other home entertainment media are now being exploited. They are angry because their long owned golden children of difficult-to-copy media and strictly controlled distribution are all but dead and gone in just a few short...decades.

HBO had the right idea. So did the people at TiVO. If you put those two people together, maybe put them in the room with Microsoft and the Netflix people, and you have a way to save those industries. Hulu is great, but people don't want to watch TV or movies on their computer. They want to see them in a theater or on their big-ass TV from their couch. Microsoft and Netflix got together and released a product for the XBox, but without the ability to browse the entire Netflix catalog without using a computer, it seems kind of cheap and flimsy. The HBO people were the first to realize that a premium subscription-based service for media delivery would generate massive revenue if you had access to superior and exclusive content. The TiVO people realized that you don't want to watch shit on someone else's crap schedule and you hate commercials.

All of these ideas are sound, and if you combine them, you save the film and television industries simultaneously. Here's what I would suggest NBC/Universal, Sony Pictures, ABC, etc all do to save themselves:
1. Create a new content delivery method that utilizes the internet and can deliver to custom TV-set top boxes, game consoles, computers, mobile phones, absolutely anything. Create a simple API for it, release an application for it on every platform you can imagine.
2. Release content as swiftly as you can, sticking to a release schedule.
3. Make it a tiered offering. Offer subscriptions for exclusive high-quality commercial-free content, and occasionally exclusive content or content released sooner than the free versions. Offer free content that's low quality and full of advertisements. Offer global subscriptions (like for an entire "television network") and offer local subscriptions (like for a single "television show"). Talk to the people at Netflix and look at the original HBO/Cable TV business models.
4. Acknowledge that people with little money and lots of time will always circumvent any copy protection schemes you have in place and write them off. They are not worth pursuing. Most people are lazy and will use the *free* product if it's also *convenient*, and pay extra if they really like it.
5. Realize that streaming content is not the way to go, that a push-based content model is superior. Coming home and seeing what there is to download is not nearly as exciting as coming home and seeing what has downloaded.

Record industry, you're doomed. The only chance you have to save yourself is to realize that, very soon, you will not be able to make a profit selling recorded music. There are other business models in your industry you should start looking to exploit, because soon people will also realize they don't need to pay you for your stupid lawsuits anymore.

Software industry, you've already figured most of this out. Kudos.

Also, it is late and I am tired so I apologize for the poor quality of this post in both grammar, style, and form.