Digital Piracy: The Future Of Digital Piracy

Corporate copyright industry controllers publicly voice concerns about globally lost revenue, vocally touting that pirates take part in criminal action that pressures companies into downsizing employee numbers and decreasing investment in future endeavors. Music, film, TV, movie, and softwares industries are all worth billions of dollars, with record companies alone bringing in nearly $25 billion dollars. As a consumer, it’s hard to reconcile the thought of a $25 billion dollar industry claiming piracy revenue losses well into the hundreds of billions. Industry advocates cite any act of media piracy as a harmful act and an act that inhibits them from making money; therefore the perceived loss or potential loss of those hundreds of billions

Sites like Periscope, where people can live-stream content present new challenges for copyright owners. In The Future of Online Piracy is Easy, Free, and Already in Your Pocket, Caitlin Dewey for the Washington Post writes, “Consider, for instance, the takedown requests that HBO sent Periscope over the show. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1996 law that guides most Internet copyright dealings, online platforms aren’t responsible for what users post to them — but if they receive a complaint from a rights-holder, they have to remove the violating content. The problem here, of course, is that there’s no content to remove. Periscope is live, and “Game of Thrones” only lasts an hour. By the time HBO filed its takedown requests, they only applied to users who had archived their stream for later review.” This suggests that though industry and criminal investigators currently have their hands full going after sites like Napster, the Pirate Bay, or Kickass Torrents, the future of digital piracy may take a different form. The thought one has to have, while reviewing the past and future of digital piracy, is if people do not want to pay for content, are we in an age where they will always be able to find a way to access that content anyway? If people who pirate software, music, games, and TV shows don’t care about breaking the law, industry must incentivize consumers to pay for content in other ways. For their part, companies have started to do this. Research into digital piracy is the number one way industry tries to combat it. Understanding consumers’ motivations and modes of piracy, helps industry to combat its effects. TV studios, movie studios, and other industry stakeholders have begun to make efforts to mitigate consumer desire for pirated content by increasing ease and availability of legal online content, including licensed streaming sites and on