- 27/06/2016
- Category: Commentaries
One of the 21st century challenges is to deal with the issue of copyrights. Internet is an ocean for countless pirates surfing for free digital materials. This often violates copyrights and significantly harms the content authors. The revenue obtained from physical sale is experiencing steep decline as the consumerism trend shifts to online platforms. Nevertheless, internet is also a very effective media for promotion that helps industries to prevail. Is there any room for compromise?
Entertainment industry gets the major hit from the growing illegal online activities. Incentive given to authors for their creativity is getting smaller because of piracy. To bridge the desire of cheap digital products with the industry’s needs, several platforms emerge by offering access to libraries of digital books, films, songs, or other products with relatively affordable subscription fees. Such platforms include Apple Music, Spotify, and JOOX. Those platforms reach millions of download, but still, illegal downloads persist. Why?
“Even though purchasing procedure is getting easier after the emerge of e-commerce in the age of digital society, as long as free means to get/download digital contents are available, people will choose the illegal way anyway – especially in societies where law enforcement does not touch this field.”
Let’s take a look at another digital product that successfully forces the users to pay: WhatsApp. At the beginning, the online chatting application is provided for free. Its user friendly features and light memory usage attracted millions of users and it as somehow made them dependent to it. When the app imposed not-free-anymore policy, people have no option but to pay. Indeed, WhatsApp is much different with music apps. WhatsApp may not be a perfect example to compare, since it does not contain other products but itself, unlike iTunes, Spotify, or JOOX which bring songs to its users. Yet, it sets a model on how they succeed in creating an environment where people have no access to what they want other than through purchasing; and people agree to. Of course, this is not a single app developer’s job to accomplish. To create such pressure, governments’ involvements are required through advanced technology-based law enforcement to combat digital piracy.
Beside creating such pressure, innovation in terms of added value given to the products also plays an important role. This is what makes cinemas still sell – even though enjoying movies can be done illegally at home – it is about sensation of enjoying show at a specially designed environment (in addition to release date immediacy). There must be a way that makes enjoying digital products legally much better than illegally. Music apps are doing great job in improving features like playlists and track recommendations. Yet, next innovations should be significant enough to shift users from being free to premium listeners.
Creating a trend of buying something that was used to be free is never easy (even though not all digital products should be obtained for free). Everything is about supply and demand. Even though purchasing procedure is getting easier after the emerge of e-commerce, as long as free means to get/download digital contents are available, people will choose this way anyway – especially in societies where law enforcement does not touch this field.
We can learn that piracy, in digital age, is an unwise smart action. Or is it not? Is piracy part of a smart society? Should we include ‘legal’ determination to define ‘smart’ society?
photo credit: pexels.com
