Pirates Ahoy

Piracy. The bane of the music, film and software industries. They lose tens of millions of pounds/dollars a year in lost revenue due to people buying cheap duplicates of their products. But I have little sympathy.

First, in the 90s, the music industry stabbed itself in the foot by continuing to keep the price of CDs at a ridiculously inflated £15. Yes, we all know the cost of signing artists, recording albums and promoting records is high. But when your customers also know that the price of producing a CD with inlay etc is around 20 pence, they won't stand for it. Especially when you see how much record companies and artists make in profit. The record companies' arrogance was beyond belief.

So what happened? Well, companies like CD-Wow imported genuine CDs from Hong Kong for £9, and the market was forced to lower prices across the board. But it was too late. By then, users had got used to copying CDs, downloading them and CD sales had plummetted.

Then we look at the DVD industry. There was a time when you had to wait 6 months from when a film was out on DVD rental to when you could buy that same film on DVD. Is it any suprise that people were copying them when there was such huge demand?

Now this problem has been solved with simultaneous rental and buying releases for DVDs. But there's still a major issue. Firstly, let me explain that I'm not really into piracy - the quality isn't that great, you can get viruses on your PC and I can pretty much afford to buy/rent the DVDs I want. However, there's one thing which will turn my to piracy quicker than anything else - anything other than a film on my DVD.

I don't want trailers, I don't want copyright messages, and above all I don't want messages telling me not to buy pirate DVDs. Why are these messages there? I've just rented a genuine copy, so you're targeting the wrong person surely? At least let me skip through these messages, or I'll get myself a copy without them on. And the film company won't benefit from that at all.