A letter was sent today from a coalition of representatives of employees in the creative industries, that is nicely covered here at the Guardian online.
Essentially, they are saying that the government and broadband providers need to clamp down on illegal file-sharing, as otherwise, jobs will be lost because of the lack of money to fund new music, TV, film and other creative content.
Right question, wrong answer.
Here are some things that the ‘rights’ industry can do to stop illegal file-sharing:
Allow all licensed TV content to be available online in the broadcaster’s on-demand system without limitation on time or format
We see media consumption behaviours where people treat file-sharing as their own personal video recorder (PVR). So rather than trying to remember to programme their Sky+ or V+ boxes to record the content, they just go online when they’ve missed it and watch it then. They might do this every week, or they might choose to ‘catch up’ on an entire series over a few days late on in its season run.
This is the one type of behaviour that consumers find easiest to justify morally. After all, they could have set their own PVR to ‘series record’ which would have enabled all of the above behaviour, so they see no difference between getting it from the hard disk of their SKY+ box, or a bunch of their peers who also want to catch up. And there are benefits as well to the consumer of getting illegal content of this type in that it can be portable. How many people do you see on the train or at the airport watching content on their mobile device. Not all devices are easily supported by the on demand services and licensors are reluctant to release their content to go mobile. With illegal downloads consumers can move it anywhere they choose, and provided they only use it themselves and don’t sell it on, they see little moral issue with that.
There are rights licences that prohibit a local broadcaster from delivering over IP. So for example, the BBC may show something on TV, that then is not available on iPlayer. Or it is only available in a streaming format and not a download format. This is just encouraging the same behaviour as they again don’t see why it shouldn’t be available. In fact, they’re often upset that it’s not because they relied on it being there. I remember a recent series of Dr Who that we wouldn’t let the kids stay up to watch, so planned on watching it on iPlayer the next day… but it wasn’t there. No consumer understands why this should be the case.
They also don’t understand that when they miss the first two episodes of Ashes to Ashes (I’m not BBC bashing by the way, just they’re the shows I love and come easiest to mind!), and decide they’ll save them up for watching together just before the final episode airs, only to find that they can only watch last week’s episode.
Leverage the long tail, and make everything available for download purchase
Currently, there are artists missing out on royalties not because their work is being stolen, but because their publishers won’t make it available. In the old world, works were ‘deleted’ from the back catalogue, never to be issued on vinyl or CD again. When iTunes came along, we all believed that this would never be the case again, but I challenge anyone to go and find Freaky Realistic (best band that ever came out of Peckham), Half Man Half Biscuit (best indie band ever, Gawd rest John Peel), the Mighty Lemondrops… or of course The Beatles – I’m guessing you’ve heard of them? The only way to get any of these in digital format, is to buy a CD and rip it (in the case of the Beatles, and still also technically illegal in breach of mechanical copyright), or to download it from another charitable fan who wants to spread the love. in the case of the latter, again, the attitude of customers to this situation morally is that it’s fine. They don’t see any other way to get the content; and to be fair, there is no other way.
Well, there are two things going on here. The first is that the labels, either through contracts or other whims are not making available old back catalogue content. The second is that there are still artists and their management who are resisting digital; again for reasons that no consumer can understand.
If everything was available for legal download, through a variety of providers (we need more choice than just iTunes, and we need companies like Tesco Digital to get better support) then all of the reasons for customers to download that are outlined above go away.
Amazon’s whole business has been built on the concept of the ‘long tail’ the thought that they make everything available, and although they might only sell one copy of a particular book every year, there are millions of other books that they also only sell one of, rather than relying solely like the high street retailers do, on big new releases. iTunes is also doing well in this way, but the ‘long tail’ is longer than we all thought it was, and we need to get to the end of it as best we can at any rate.
Don’t make us pay twice, or even five times!
I have bought The Wizard of Oz five times over.
Two VHS copies, one was worn out, the other damaged by a small child. So then we got a DVD. One was lost, the next scratched to hell by small children and the final one is hanging on by a thread as it’s been through the Disc Doctor scratch repairer a couple of times now. Surely, I am buying the rights to watch a title, and not to own a physical object? The video and music industry have relied on new formats for years to revitalise their sales, and the advent of digital is bringing that model to an end. Once content is safely on the hard drives of their customers in HD format, then they have no need to re-purchase their content, except in the case of data loss (you see where working for a storage company finally comes in to this stuff eh?!). But equally, if I have purchased £100’s of titles from iTunes and have a hard disc crash and lose everything, iTunes knows what I’ve bought already. Why on earth should I have to pay again to re-download it? If they want to charge me a nominal fee to cover their bandwidth costs, that’s fine, but I object strongly to buying the same content over and over again.
This is why it’s so refreshing that Tesco Digital offer their ‘backup’ service, where once purchased, content can be downloaded whenever you want. We need more providers like this, and we need the rights holders to make this easier for digital music providers.
This is another reason that the consumers we talked to cited for downloading. They have no idea how to ‘rip’ a DVD so that their kids can watch it on TV, so instead of doing that, they download it. What’s the difference? I’m entitled under the licence for the DVD to back it up, so why can’t I get that backup from someone else? It’s the same content?
MAKE IT CHEAPER, make it easier and make it better
If there is more available in the catalogue, if you are making content incredibly easy to access, if you are offering people the chance to download instead of buying a PVR, then all of these increase the overall volume of people willing to pay for digital content. However, the price point is currently too high.
More volume, easier to access means the price can come down and still mean more money flowing in.
Why does track 8 on an album that the band threw in when they were short a track at the last minute, cost the same on iTunes as the 2 tracks that were number 1 hit singles across the world? If you think the album as a format is dying, it’s because iTunes is killing it! Whereas putting 20 tracks on an album used to be an artist’s way of making an album of more value to the purchaser, today they’re punishing them because it costs more!
Pricing is also anti-competitive. If someone like Tesco wanted to sell tracks at 39p each, or ‘bargain bucket’ albums for £4, they couldn’t because the labels won’t let them. Because iTunes carries so much weight, the labels don’t want to offer content for sale to anyone else cheaper for fear of upsetting iTunes. It is completely bizarre that I can walk into HMV or Sainsbury’s and pick up a CD or DVD for £3, but if I want to download that same content from iTunes it might cost as much as £10.
Finally, if you want to beat pirates, make it easier to get content, and offer more than they can; i.e. make the experience better.
Peer to peer filesharing and downloading is not an activity easily accessible to most computer users. When they do get it up and running, they are faced with a variety of different formats, and potentially having to do codec conversion and all sorts. If consumers can get content easily, they will pay a premium. If you can save a consumer 30 minutes of messing about then that’s immediately worth 25p-50p.
If you would rather they watch your version of Night At The Museum 1, then make it so it has interactive features and stuff that pirates simply wouldn’t be able to replicate. Formats like X-Box and Blu-ray offer that kind of opportunity for an interactive layer, that could easily be replicated onto desktop computers and portable devices, in such a way that it was impossible to pirate.
I would never watch a ‘cam’ recording of a film made by a guy in the cinema with a handheld video camera. Why not? Because it’s illegal? Well, sure, but mostly because it’s terrible quality. I would rather wait and pay for the DVD. The same principle applies, make all ‘official’ content high quality and an end to end experience.
Finally…
If the media industry addressed all of the points above, the market for illegal file-sharing would shrink to miniscule amounts. None of the scenarios outlined above are of consumers as criminals, but currently, technically, everything outlined above is an offence. Would you rather we go after these people? Or should we just make it easier for them to get content legally?
The longer the industry persist with the models they’ve been used to, the more reasons they create for people to actually download illegally, and the more consumers they turn into criminals. And rather like the old adage about soft drugs leading to hard drugs, if people are used to downloading Dr. Who because they missed it on Saturday, they’ll start to question why they shouldn’t download DVDs that they’ve never purchased, and will therefore begin stealing revenue away from the industry, whereas if they’d remained in a legal environment, this would never happen.
To paraphrase Billy Bragg from a Radio 4 discussion a few weeks ago, he said that the music industry’s commercial was fundamentally flawed – and he was talking about downloading and digital distribution. He said if it persisted it would die, and I agree with him.
What’s the alternative?
Well, they could load all of the responsibility for keeping their revenue streams intact on to us, the taxpayers. They could make the government and courts deal with offenders. They could put levies on our broadband service. All things that they are lobbying for.
But what this all ultimately does is make the consumer pay more and more for what is actually a problem the industry itself could solve if only they changed their thinking. I lobby the government to say no to these lobbyists, and encourage the unions to look back to their employers to solve these problems, not the government; after all it’s the employers in that industry that hold the ability and power to make these changes, and to dry up file-sharing forever.