This week I’m joined by Karyn Temple, Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel for the Motion Picture Association, to discuss how the trade group wages the global war on intellectual property infringement. A couple of months back we had the MPA’s Terri Davies on the show to talk about the Trusted Partners Network and how the film industry could help cut down on piracy before a film is released. But what do you do when it’s out in the world and starts showing up on BitTorrents? How do you shut down feeds showing live sporting events in real-time? This is the other side of the 360-degree protection against internet piracy the MPA is striving to implement. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to share it with a friend!
Groups like the MPAA will never get a handle on piracy, because focusing on shutting down things is just playing whack a mole. Without something like the great firewall of china, this is impossible to do. You cannot police the entire internet, which is global, because even in a maximalist approach from the MPAA, their reach doesn't extend everywhere.
However, it turns out most people are more willing to go the route of easiest access; when content becomes more easily available, piracy declines. We have data to prove this. If you make it easier to get content, people will go the path of least resistance.
Unfortunately, the sheer amount of streaming services has made getting content harder, and less affordable, and so the path of least resistance slides back. Ultimately, they will probably still try to play whack-a-mole, the way they did when sharing became most common in the beginning of the 2000s, and probably make themselves out to be the villain, because people don't like throwing people in jail on behalf of faceless corporations.
The solution would be to make streaming cheaper and easier. They'll probably go the more expensive route.
Actually even with the great firewall, piracy still thrives in China lol. From my personal experience it's even more widely accepted to pirate movies in China because there's genuinely no legitimate way to access them. Or in some instances paying for content legally will only get you a heavily censored version of it. (e.g. TV shows like Game of Thrones that contains a lot of nudity, sex, and violence) For most Chinese people it's not "legal movie" vs "illegal movie", but "illegal movie" vs "no movie at all".
Piracy was coming down as content was made easily available.
Now that it's getting more difficult, piracy is rising again.
This isn't difficult.
Yeah they really don't want to accept that going to route of maximum enforcement means creating something akin to the great firewall of china, where AIs and algorithms track and collect everyone's data in order to then prosecute them.
Or, it's not that they don't want to accept that, it's that they don't want to be seen accepting that. They absolutely would love a great firewall of America.