Why Choose Piracy?
I choose piracy for 3 simple reasons. Firstly it interests me because technology is ever evolving; something at the top of the technological tree one year can be near the bottom the next. Secondly technology is growing at a faster rate now than ever before and finally I am in 2 minds about piracy myself whether it’s truly evil or if the media industry over charges for their products.
Furthermore I have chosen to research piracy because it relates to my course via the research I will have to perform as well as the effect it may or may not have on my production. Plus I am curious to see if anything they plan to implement whether being the Music Industry or Government could actually work.
What is Piracy?
First to understand this investigation we need to understand what Piracy is, and what it means for the music industry.
“Copyright infringement (or copyright violation) is the unauthorised use of material that is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_(media)
To put it simply ‘Piracy’ is viewed as theft. Downloading music, videos, games or any other form of copyrighted material online is classified as piracy and therefore is against the Law.
Research
How to become a Pirate
Now you know in a sense what piracy is but you don’t know the methods used to complete it. Via looking through the Internet and reading a few key forums I came across a huge range of ways to download that latest single from ‘Take that’ for free. The beauty of many of these applications is that regardless of your technical ability there is one somewhere that you can use for your nefarious deeds.
Rapidshare and Youtube are both online websites offering 2 unique services. Rapidshare offers an online file hosting service where you can allow other people to download files you upload. For instance if you wanted to share a piece of art you had completed with your friend in Taiwan as well as your friend in Alaska but did not want to have to upload it to both of them separately you could just upload it to Rapidshare, pop them a link, and let them download it from there. However as easily as it is to share legal content on Rapidshare it is to share illegal content.
Youtube offers a streaming video service allowing you to watch the latest Music Videos or other people’s random recordings they’ve uploaded onto their accounts. While Youtube has some security to stop downloading of their music videos it can’t stop a user simply recording incoming sound from the website and then saving it as a .MP4 and adding it to their IPod.
Although both websites offer brilliant services and others like them such as Megaupload or Vinemo, they both offer very easy methods of gathering illegal content for free.
Spotify and We7.com
Spotify and We7.com offer alternative ways to buying music. Spotify is a fully functioning application with advertises around the program as well as an advertising single or album every couple of music songs played. Similarly We7.com is an online radio station where you have a 10second ad played every so often.What this enables you to do is choose your favourite songs from anyone and anywhere to create your ultimate playlist for free. Both options offer the benefits of listening to a radio station you control yourself with far fewer ads. Spotify also has a pay-monthly plan of £8.99 where you pay to remove all of the advertisements and get to listen to any of the musical tracks you want unlimited for free.
However while both projects are superb and offer people more reasons to not to use pirated singles they also help pirates gain an ever larger and better quality music. They both suffer from the same problem as Youtube, where a user can simply record their incoming sound.
While doing some more research I came across a BBC News post about how the British government plan to deal with Piracy, over a couple of weeks a few artists also felt they needed to voice their opinions on the matter. I feel that both opinions are correct to some degree however I lean more towards Ed O’Brien’s point of view.
The British Government released plans on how they were aiming to deal with the piracy problems at large. A key statement released was that:
‘Persistent File-shares could have their internet accounts suspended in an attempt to crack down on piracy’.
It is about time that the government stepped in to deal with the problem, but like the FAC (Featured Artists' Coalition), British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild I feel this action would be an overreaction. Ed O’Brien’s comment below sums up what I feel about the matter.
"It's going to start a war which they'll never win." - Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien
Regardless of how the government try to punish people for downloading files illegally it won’t stop them, even if ISPs (Internet Service Providers e.g. BT) stepped into help, I’d find it hard to believe that catching and recording illegal downloading will be possible. Simply because how will they manage to tell the difference between legal downloads and illegal downloads without going against people’s privacy rights?
However, 11 days after this statement Lily Allen stepped forward to rally stars against piracy. Taio Cruz, James Blunt and Tim Rice-Oxley all put forward their support to Lily as well as congratulating her for stepping up.
"File-sharing has had a very, very negative effect on my career, as it has on many others" - Taio Cruz
Taio Cruz is a prime example of how music piracy can be damaging, by having his debut album being leaked almost 3 months before the scheduled release date he and his music label were not sure whether to continue. The amount of money lost for both was most likely huge with many people downloading the album or songs before they were released.
So while some artists are strongly against punishing people for piracy others would like to see nothing but punishment after so much stress and anguish caused.
Questionnaire
Design & Subjects
My research questionnaire was designed to enable me to find out about 4 simple questions. Firstly how people acquire their music whether legally or not. If they knew how and if so what method of pirating they used and finally whether or not they felt that the current anti-piracy laws were enough.Above you can see a graph showing you the percentage of varying ages who answered my questionnaire. I decided to keep those answering my question at an age range around the target of my Media Productions demopgrahic elsewhere in the course. This enabled me to create a larger questionnaire to send out in one sweep rather than 2 separate smaller pieces.
‘Acquiring’ Music
The graph on the next page shows you the answers I gained from the question on “How they ‘acquire’ their music normally” which aimed to find out if the highstreet is truly dying out like the Media Industry fears. From the graph it appears that the highstreet has lost popularity with just being tied first with 5 out of the 12 participants in the questionnaire. This shows us that ~58% now prefer other alternatives to going to highstreet and buying their music. This step can be explained however by the fact it is far more convenient to use the internet to get your music whether illegal or by using programs such as Spotify.
However with the options Highstreet, Internet D/L (download) and Streaming all being legal it seems the majority still prefer paying and owning their own music over illegal downloading. Out of those options it seems that the majority still using legal methods prefer owning a physical Album over the music tracks floating around in the internet ether of iTunes or Spotify.But with just under half of the votes illegal downloading clearly shows the change in perspectives. If anything this graph shows us that the majority of people no longer own huge album collections but rather store their music on their computers or laptops. This in itself makes sense because with my demographic being of the age range 16-25 I would be greatly surprised if even 1 out of the 12 does not own a mobile phone of IPod that they use to play their music.
Illegal Download – Can you?
Interestingly only 8 of 12 (75%) knew how to download music illegally; from the previous graph of how people 'acquire' their music we can see that 5 of those 8 use illegal downloading as their main source. So even though downloading music illegally no longer requires such skill, especially due to programs such as Limewire making it exceedingly quick and easy, it is very surprising that not everyone knows how to download and use it let alone use it as their main source of acquiring music.The graph on the next page was designed to find out what method of piracy people would use if they could. There are quite few methods to how you can go about downloading music illegally. The 4 mentioned are considered the main 4 methods and alternatives are normally based on these products.
I was surprised on how many within the group I asked use torrents because of the technical ability needed is far higher for them than either of the Limewire or Rapidshare users. Likewise those using Youtube would need to have a specific ‘Ripping’ program or an Audio recorder which most cost money.Anti-Piracy Laws – Do they Work?
I am a firm believer that Anti-Piracy laws will never be enough, or in reality work, so I was very surprised when just under half of those I asked felt that they were enough. I expected more comments along the lines of "piracy laws don’t stop anyone from downloading music" or "They still haven't managed to prevent it at all" where as I got comments as "There's enough advertising to put me off".So from this questionnaire it would seem that anti-piracy laws are at current not working.
Conclusion
How bad is it for the Media Industry really?
This is quite a hard thing to pin down. There are obviously a lot of debates going on with how serious the problem with piracy is, how harsh the punishments need to be to stop people actively using it as a source of their media products as well as whether you government has a right to intervene in the situation etc.
As the questionnaire results showed the problem with piracy the moment isn’t the fact the punishments are too lenient or non-existent it is because ‘pirating’ itself is far too easy for any novice to accomplish with a computer and internet connection. The increase of technology and the constant ‘dumbing’ down of tasks that take technical knowledge will more than likely increase the amount of piracy. A clear sign of this progression is with the Media task of creating a Music Video. As little as 10years ago creating a video even to amateur standard would nigh impossible without huge amount of effort. But now it is relatively simple to do.
What I can tell from the copyright laws in place now and the few reported cases of piracy is that the Media Industry at present is fighting a losing battle. Until they offer a stronger deterrent or an incentive to not partake in piracy people will continue. Even in cases where the law has been involved such as in with the PirateBay legal case due to the different copyright laws in certain countries, or even being non-existent, those sites can continue to live promoting piracy all the more.
However is piracy really going to kill the media industry? From my research I can safely conclude no chance in hell or heaven. If anything it will promote more security and better products to bring people into the real experience other that of a cheap pirated copy. Recently 3D technology has hit the big screen and with films such as Avatar bringing in £100,000,000s in profit my point is proven all the stronger.
Affect on Production
When beginning this project I didn’t think piracy would have much effect on my media products either with my production or ancillary texts. This is because Piracy is something which affects profit margins most significantly. From a educational perspective it would be absurd for it to damage my work.
However it has provided me an insight into what my audience feel with piracy and provided me a good opportunity to gain thorough opinions on certain subject matter I could use within my audience research.
Evaluation
Research
I feel the research as a whole was quite productive. By using a mix of sources from the BBC, forums as well as my constructed questionnaire I was about to look at a range of views on the piracy issue.
However in answering the question I feel I didn’t collect enough information to truly give perspective to the piracy issue and everyone it affects from the Artists themselves to the men and women creating art work on album covers to those purchasing the music. Piracy is a chance affect; a little damage at the top is an avalanche to those at the bottom.
Project
The project itself I feel was a success that it enabled me an opportunity to find out more about the media industry. However I feel it was a failure similarly to the research in the fact it did not truly give a full perspective of the piracy issue.
Bibliography
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8247376.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8266287.stm
http://cnsmediamt2.blogspot.com/2009/09/media-questionnaire.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
http://www.webtvwire.com/why-the-pirate-bay-court-case-verdict-is-meaningless-file-sharing-will-soon-evolve/
http://courtblog.thepiratebay.org/
