14 DAY TRIAL // The media industry's grand plan to stop piracy is limited to censoring websites and hoping people will suddenly get a burning urge to pay for stuff they don't want to pay for. Essentially, the copyright-dependent industries believe that they can force people to pay for the stuff they're selling.
There may be some truth behind that, coercion does get results sometimes. But an even bigger truth is that people don't want to be forced to do anything.
The carrot is probably going to work better than the stick, especially for stuff that anyone can live without or for which replacements are easily found, like music, movies, games and so on.
Every time you're going to try to force someone to do something, you're going to get that someone to fight back.
And, while media corporations can afford to spend tens of millions on lawyers and politicians, all their money can't fight off millions of people.
The latest example of this is the blocking of four popular BitTorrent sites in the UK. The move has gotten a lot of people annoyed, angry even, and drove them to find solutions.
Google saw a huge surge in searches for "kickasstorrents proxy," for example, as TorrentFreak noticed. And these people already knew what a proxy was and how it could help them.
Many more didn't, but they came looking for a solution, almost 200,000 of them (as of writing) found one in our own article. Many more found it elsewhere. Within minutes, they were reunited with their favorite pirate sites.
It would be very interesting to know whether at least 200,000 people suddenly went to iTunes, or to Amazon or any other online or even offline store, and started buying stuff they wouldn't have bought if KickassTorrents and the other sites were freely available.
It would be interesting to know whether even 2,000 people did so. Search interest in iTunes certainly didn't spike after the block, it followed its usual pattern.
But the tirade against pirate sites is going to continue. The industry can't actually explain why it fights piracy so ferociously or whether piracy is actually detrimental to them.
And the lawyers and lobbyist pocketing millions fighting this unwinnable fight, would like to keep it that way. As long as the media industry stays ignorant, they're making easy money.
