The obvious solution
Recently-arrested Megaupload king Kim Dotcom and the various copyright holders claiming losses of half a billion dollars have more in common than they realise. And they should meet in the middle to solve the internet war.
Dotcom’s assets are valued at $175 000 000, according to news stories describing the luxury cars, the sprawling mansion, the opulent lifestyle.
But hang on. How did he get all the money if he was, as the big movie companies insist, ripping them off and making the stuff available for free?
It turns out that the oh-so-sophisticated download model of the piracy barons is to break their downloaders into two sectors:
- People who can download for free, but with restrictions imposed by artificial delays, slow download times, Captcha authentication and other limits.
- People who pay around ten dollars per month to avoid the limitations and download as much as they want at normal speeds.
Those few dollars a month from millions of downloaders soon adds up.
To $175 million, apparently. Which is about a third of the half-billion dollars supposedly lost by the copyright holders.
Now, I’m always a bit leery of these claimed losses. Inflated to buggery, usually. A movie company points to fifty thousand downloads of a film costing $19.99 on DVD and bingo, that’s a million dollar loss right there. Add up all those sales lost to pirate downloaders, and you’re talking big, big money.
Assuming that all those computer geeks flying the Jolly Roger were going to fork over $19.99 for a DVD anyway. Most of these guys have terabyte hard drives stuffed with movies they’ll never watch if they live to be a thousand. If it wasn’t for pirate download networks, they’d buy only a fraction of the booty, but just as cruise passengers load up their plates at the all-you-can-eat buffets, if it’s all for free you might as well get as much as you can fit in.
In everyday life, people just don’t eat that much when they have to pay full price, nor do they buy as many videos at ten or twenty dollars a pop, nor shop iTunes for a hundred thousand dollars worth of albums.
But they will cheerfully pay ten bucks a month to download more movies than they can ever watch, more music than they can listen to, and more books than they can ever read. Ten dollars a month for “free” stuff.
So why on earth aren’t the copyright holders tapping into the same revenue stream that Kim Dotcom was enjoying and setting up their own subscription models?
All you can legitimately download for ten dollars a month. The thing sells itself. You could up it to twenty dollars or more a month, and if the product was high quality, compared to the often difficult or dodgy offerings of the pirate kings, you’d still get millions of people signing on.
Instead we get half-baked schemes like SOPA and PIPA, internet blackouts, and denial-of-service attacks by outlaw hackers. The internet is rapidly turning into a battleground, and that’s not good for anybody’s business.
—Skyring