"Tunneling Under" the New York Times' Paywall
zaccohn.com
zaccohn.com
If you look at the movie and music industries, antipiracy measures have constantly failed to stop people from "stealing" their products. They want the people to go back to "the way it was before" when you bought your newspaper every morning and rented videotapes. All it did is give more troubles to legitimate buyers and give more incentive to go bittorent.
Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users and give us the feeling we're losing something.
Riiiight. Because Netflix, Spotify and others will be doing just dandy with their paywalls when it's as trivially easy to download a pirated, DVD-quality movie as it is to download some text and images today.
I love the logic, though: it's not that you're annoyed that you have to pay for something that you think should be free; it's that the DRM isn't onerous enough that it makes it more convenient for you to pay.
My point was that if you have a free (albeit illegal) concurrence, if you want to keep your market share you have to give some added value. For services like Spotify, the added value is that you have access to a big catalog of tracks that you can listen to instantly without having to double check for quality and authenticity. You can listen and share those tracks across computers and devices transparently. It's more convenient than bittorent and it's legal.
People go towards piracy when the system doesn't satisfy their requirements. Downloading a pirated movie is not as easy as it is to pay Netflix $10/month to have a vast catalog of instant streaming options. There is no comparative service that is free (legally or illegally). It's also argubly easier since you don't have to choose the format of the movie you are downloading or the encoder or several other options while being unsure wether it will play on your PS3 or XBox.
If you create an intuitive and reasonable system for consumers to operate it's very likely that they'll stop looking towards a sub-par alternative like pirating things.
A couple of examples:
Why should I care, as a consumer, that Hulu hasn't reached a deal to stream some TvShows to my PS3 but did reach it for the Web site? It doesn't make any sense to anybody but those who profit from this. How can this be helpful? People got Hulu Plus with the idea that everything would have been available on the PS3 and then some more, but this wasn't the case. This is a frustrated consumer whose demand couldn't be met not because of lack of technical capability or just impossibility. It's really just because of obscure business deals that have nothing reasonable attached to them from a consumer point of view.
The same could be said about music releases that are not international. What is the point of this? How is it that a UK consumer can listen to a given album while a US consumer can't (and vice-versa)? Provided both want to pay its full price.
People go towards piracy as a last resort, not as a first step, it's almost a precious feedback mechanism that tells the market what people really want.
You can of course dismiss all of this by simply saying that the consumer has no right to decide whether he agrees or not with the business decision. It's true, but that's not moving forward the discussion in any useful way.