The growing number of legal services for downloading and streaming content influenced a decrease in piracy. After shutting down Megaupload, some users stopped downloading pirated content and have begun using legal services for buying and renting movies, series and other copyrighted material. Seeing that Android applications that cost money could also be downloaded for free and outside of the Google Play Store, which is still very much frowned upon by developers who work hard on their apps, this is a topic relevant for the Android community as well.
Organizations for protection of copyrights, record industry and film makers have been fighting against piracy on the Internet for years in many ways – from finding and punishing or fining people who downloaded pirated content (with fines amounting to hundreds of thousand dollars), extinguishing the most popular sites for content sharing such as Megaupload or blocking access to the Pirate Bay and similar services. While such tactics of fighting against piracy were not always successful in influencing the reduction of piracy, it appears that last year’s shutting down of Megaupload and some other content sharing sites, as well as the arrest of Kim Dotcom, world’s most famous pirate, started to slowly change things.
Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics conducted a research at the beginning of this year with some interesting results. After shutting Megaupload down, a number of users stopped downloading pirated content and have turned to legal services for downloading and streaming music and videos whose earnings rose between six and ten percent after the arrest of Kim Dotcom. But this arrest of Kim Dotcom and shutting down some services is not the sole and only reason for a decline in downloading of pirated material. Reports from Norway suggest that since 2008 until today, the piracy rate in the country has been in decline and that the number of illegally downloaded movies and songs is greatly reduced. Five years ago, the total of downloaded songs illegally was around 1.2 billion, while the figure from 2012 fell to 210 million, which amounts to only 17.5 percent compared to the number of songs downloaded in 2008, while the number of downloaded movies and television shows nearly halved in that same period.
During this time, many campaigns against piracy were carried out in Norway (and more recently, there is a more strict law intended to reduce piracy in effect), as well as in the rest of the world. But, the main reason for this change of trend and reduce in piracy in this country is a growing number of legal services that enable quick and simple ways of viewing and listening to content that interests users. It can be concluded that, when people are given the ability to easily access quality content that does not cost too much and is legal and easy to use, illegally downloading the same content does not seem so interesting and attractive anymore.
Today’s studies show that nearly 50 percent of respondents are using a service for streaming music (services like Spotify, etc.), where a large part of them are using the premium version of the service. As for the TV shows, the culmination of piracy was in the beginning of 2011. Shortly after that, when more and more legal services became available in Norway, as well as in other countries, the piracy rate dropped by more than 70 percent. And since the last year’s arrival of the popular service Netflix in Norway, a further reduce in the number of users who are downloading pirated movies is expected.
While it seems certain that piracy will never be completely eradicated, these examples show that, if users are provided with an easy and quick way of legally accessing high quality content, a large part of them is ready to pay for that content.