The entertainment industries have led a worldwide campaign to ratchet up “anti-piracy” laws — but have they been effective in either reducing piracy or increasing revenue? Recently, there have been some very positive signs for those industries, while people have been signing up for popular authorized services. These two factors raise a serious question: is the success caused by the innovation or the legal changes? Is it the carrot or the stick that is leading us into this new world?
Read the full report below, or check out some of the key findings [pdf].
Makes sense. If you create a website like Spotify that gives away the content that previous users had to pirate, piracy goes down. But that doesn’t solve the problem for the creator who doesn’t get PAID a fair wage for his creation.
While I know many have objections to Spotify’s payouts to artists, that is a huge separate issue of its own. The fact remains that encouraging the growth of robust, competitive legal alternatives like Spotify is a much more effective way to get artists what they need than playing whac-a-mole with pirate sources.