What we have done:
Since the project plan review meeting we have held four rather long meetings where we have analyzed the status of piracy at the moment from every aspect of it: economical, social, political, technical. Between each meeting we kept digging up and reading more articles that would help us support our theories or create new ones. We have thought about possible scenarios and different possibilities and solutions of our research topic in the future. Among others we have thought about a service, a platform or a device useful for our project, that helps people to get contents through piracy when considered not fair (quality/price).
What we will do:
We will meet and interview some people involved in sharing economy or music/movie/software industry that can be affected by piracy, considering that develop the service that we will decide to adopt.
Challenges encountered:
We have had to discuss about what side that piracy has to take. We took a look on the psycological aspect, if it’s good for people and how affects behaviors; how bad is for companies in the end counting the potential revenue, the avarage of selling compared the illegal downloads; what can be pirated, the quality of pirated stuff depending on the kind of media.
We have had to discuss about what side that piracy has to take. We took a look on the psycological aspect, if it’s good for people and how affects behaviors; how bad is for companies in the end counting the potential revenue, the avarage of selling compared the illegal downloads; what can be pirated, the quality of pirated stuff depending on the kind of media.
We discussed what piracy is now, what it implies and how it is done: stealing, copying, reproducing or hacking. The differences between profit and no profit, sharing and stealing, the line between legal and illegal, piracy for “good” (sharing) or “bad” (just hacking and stealing datas to companies). After this we tried to imagine what is left to be pirated in the future.
Changes in the project:
Core issues:
- At the moment we define piracy as stealing content, which you were supposed to pay for, but you don’t (copyright infringement).
- Music and movies aren’t pirated that much anymore since good (reasonably priced with most desirable content) streaming services exist. The same will happen soon in games and software area, we believe.
- Fighting piracy through legislation is useless. [2]
- Piracy should work like a guard in order to prevent companies from increasing prices and/or lowering quality of content.
- Politicians should try and make piracy a beneficial tool for society rather than try to kill it.
- Pirates will hack contents and define themselves as “commoners”.
We have currently have 4 possible directions which we can go with:
- we can go further with hacking
- we can think of services which make usage of pirate content senseless (something like Spotify in software industry)
- we can still work on piracy in countries where streaming services are prevented from development for other reasons than price or quality (Russia, China)
- piracy in 3D printing - will physibles be a pirated thing in the future and is that the same as software piracy or something different? [3][4]
Resources:
I find your project ideas very interesting. It is fun to explore the boundaries - like when is it piracy, and when is it legal downloading? Your definition: piracy as stealing content, which you were supposed to pay for, but you don’t (copyright infringement) makes sense to me. I would like to see more about that part - exploring what makes people steal content when they are supposed to pay. What are the drivers? And what could be the solutions here? Like your second bullet point for a possible direction: we can think of services which make usage of pirate content senseless (something like Spotify in software industry). That would be cool!
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