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Pirate

Modern creative professionals always want to know what the root cause of piracy is. The answers that most people give are that pirating products easier or cheaper than actually purchasing them. While these are reasons why some people decide to pirate, they aren’t the root cause of piracy itself.

If you want to know why a product becomes widely pirated, you need to look at the product itself. All products that are widely pirated, lack economic incentive.


Cornstarch Gasoline

Here is a simple example of what I mean by economic incentive. No matter what the price of gasoline, chances are I will still buy it. I might buy less, but even at $5.00 a gallon I would fill my tank at the pump. Why? Because it’s almost impossible for me to make my own gas — the economic incentive in this case is the difficulty of duplication.

In a world where I could refine my own crude out of cornstarch, even if it was slightly inferior to the store bought stuff, I’d never go to the pump again. Nor would most people. In fact, if I could make enough of it cheaply enough I would probably start selling my cornstarch gas to anyone too lazy to make it himself.

The point is, at the moment when gasoline became easy to duplicate it stopped being a product and became open to all manners of piracy.

Music, software and all manner of digital “products” have gone the way of cornstarch gasoline. Because they are so easy to duplicate and distribute, they have lost the economic incentive that CDs and floppy disks once had. Even though I could duplicate CDs and disks well before the Internet, it would still be hard for me to find someone else who had the Styx Greatest Hits CD available for me to copy. The Internet removed the last barrier by providing a dead simple distribution model for an already easy to copy product.

What is a creative professional to do? The first step is to recognize that the media itself is a dead industry. Fighting piracy in the way that most people choose to do it, denies the simple fact that people are not willing to purchase a product that isn’t really a product anymore.

Instead, it’s time to realize that there are plenty of things out there that are still real products. For musicians, concerts and merchandise come to mind. For game producers, premium content or cross-media deals like movies or books. Lots of companies are blazing trails using these models, but too many are stilled tied to the masts of sinking ships.


Web 2.0 Roundup

As much as I dislike the fact that the simple world that we once lived in is dying, it’s time to start facing facts and time to move towards developing models that can survive and thrive in this new environment.

Either that or you could perfect a formula for cornstarch gasoline . . .

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