Google: Piracy is An Availability and Pricing Problem

[vaerk]

those damn stock pictures get me every time

 

As for the thread, Google is very much correct on that (depending on the media). For games for example, it is more about (as mentioned several times above) a form of quality control.

People are sick of not getting what they are promised or pay for, it's one of many reasons why some one might 'pirate' something.

[BrightCandle]

20 years after the internet exploded in popularity and 10 years after many got enough bandwidth to download movies and TVs we are still waiting for a world wide delivery of all TV and movies in high quality across the internet. You would have thought that any company making a TV show would want all 6 billion people on the planet to be able to pay to watch episodes but instead its all tied up in the pre internet cartels with the over air/wire owners. There is no doubt in my mind a large part of the problem is availability, you can count piracy however you like but its hard to say someone breached copyright on something that wasn't even available in their country or on the service they are restricted to by area, its certainly not a lost sale because they couldn't buy it to begin with.

 

Once all the DRM BS dies down and we finally get to good simple software that give us access to the worlds media, to watch and store what we want in the way we want it piracy will continue. MP3's showed that if you make them available without restrictions and at prices consumers will at least bare then piracy drops dramatically. Games went through a similar thing on the PC and now most companies are backing away from the heavy restrictive DRM schemes that irritated their customers. Yet TV and movies are still mostly unavailable, and when they are available its with heavy DRM and restrictions. Price + availability, no doubt about it.