Piracy- How to Fight It

You can’t. No matter how hard you try you cannot fight piracy and keep our constitutional rights in place.

What you can do is deter it by offer free online areas to both watch videos and listen to music. Hopefully then we can get back to the whole love of producing music just for… well the love of producing music. As Keith Richard says (of The Rolling Stones) “If it’s worth pirating then it must be worth something whether they get paid or not…” There are free music software you can download that is similar to Itunes but provides free music. If you’ve been in tech news for the past couple of months then you know what I’m talking about Spotify. Spotify is software almost exactly like Itunes, but it is different in the fact that it provides FREE music and limited commercials. Millions of artists right at your fingertips and if you find something you like you are probably going to go somewhere like Itunes and buy it (hopefully). The Internet Radio Pandora is also another great example of how free music can keep you from pirating (and how you can discover great new music!). It has commercials but I think that’s a small price to pay.

Then we get into the piracy of movies. I can understand wanting to stop people from pirating big budget movies, because Hollywood does have to get paid afterall. There are great alternatives to this too though. Things like Hulu and Netflix. Now there are some drawbacks, such as Hulu has commercials and Netflix has a monthly fee (but no commercials). Still though these are great alternatives to piracy and I think that companies should start heading in this direction; especially if they’re smart.

With each generation people are getting more and more tech savvy, like it or not. This being the case piracy is going to become a bigger and bigger issue there is no doubt. Before it gets to a point where the government “has no choice”than infringe on our constitutional rights and limits what can be done on the internet we need to start supporting these free applications. That is truly the only way to slow piracy rates. Unless you have a better idea of course, let me know in the comments bar.