Content piracy – a fiendish problem for media researchers

Tom Ewing, social media specialist at Kantar Media, follows up on James Myring’s ‘The piracy arms race’ article, saying there is one voice in the piracy debate that continues to be unheard – the voice of the pirates themselves…

Content piracy isn’t just an issue for media owners – it’s a fiendish problem for media researchers too. Assessing the scale of piracy is hard enough, since most approaches rely on self-reported data.

Quantifying the cost is even more difficult: attempting to determine how many copies, downloads or torrents are actually replacing legal purchases or streams pitches researchers into a highly political battle.

One voice in the debate has gone largely unheard: the ‘pirates’ themselves. There’s a serious gap in our knowledge about the kind of people who download illegally, and their motivations for doing so.

The gap is all-too-easily filled by louder voices: libertarian groups like the Pirate Bay and intellectual ‘copyfighters’ like Cory Doctorow. This distorts our understanding of piracy, as the research suggests such ‘hardcore’ pirates are very much in the minority.

In 2008, for instance, game developer Cliff Harris decided to ask people directly – “why do you pirate my games?”.  The feedback he got – after his plea became a cause of celebration across tech and games blogs – led him to change several of his own working practises.

For instance, he decided to start making longer game demos rather than using these simply as a ‘teaser’ for the paid software. But he also concluded that the core of ‘pirates on principle’ – in an industry where there are reputedly 80 illegal downloads for every paid one – was extremely small.

This is backed up by the latest research from James Myring at BDRC Continental, which he’ll be presenting at this year’s MRG Conference in Malta.  Myring talked to a number of people who have been involved in piracy, and has created a provisional segmentation of the pirate ‘universe’.

As Harris suspected, the hardcore is a minority… most people who pirate media content do so occasionally, or are ‘second-hand’ pirates whose friends share media with them.

This gives us an insight into the other big question – why do people pirate content? The answer “because they don’t want to pay for it” is obvious, but doesn’t explain all kinds of pirate behaviour. For instance, a lot of people who admit to downloading media content illegally also get a lot of other content legally. And the lure of ‘free’ can’t really explain the thousands of people who download TV episodes they could see free of charge in a few weeks or months.

The key, in my view, lies in understanding that pirates aren’t simply seizing control of pricing from content owners: they are also breaking other forms of control. Control over availability, control over distribution, and control over usage are all rights guarded by media owners. But increasingly these are coming into conflict with consumer expectation.

To take one obvious example, the lack of national borders online makes the system of national broadcast rights to TV shows increasingly unstable. A British fan of Mad Men, linked via social media to American friends discussing the latest episode, might well find waiting a far greater inconvenience than paying.

Web theorist Clay Shirky has observed that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. It’s a neat saying, with obvious relevance to the media and content industries.

The problem of delivering content to audiences was solved by industries which delivered the same packages of content (TV schedules, newspapers, CDs) to everyone who wanted them.

Now those same audiences want – and expect – more control over every aspect of that delivery system. BDRC Continental’s valuable research suggests that solutions that surrender some of that control – like streaming services – will do more to combat piracy than tactics which try and preserve it.

Tom will be speaking at this year’s MRG conference in Malta from 3rd to 6th November. Click here for more information or to book your ticket.