I’ve talked in my past blog posts about Digital Rights Management (DRM), the primary method by which the music industry tries to combat piracy. Another more straightforward method used by the industry is putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to ban websites which promote the illegal file sharing of copyrighted material.
Most ISPs in the UK and around the world “voluntarily” ban such websites after facing corporate pressure. Other ISPs, which do not voluntarily block these websites, often face legal pressures from the music industry or are forced to do so through a court order. For example, just last month the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the British music industry’s trade organisation, gained court orders which forced the UK’s main ISP providers to block a long list of file sharing websites.
The effectiveness of the banning file sharing websites is slightly uncertain. While the logic of the music industry is appreciated, it seems that they have not considered the ease by which these bans can be circumvented. In reality, all it takes is an access to a proxy server to be able to visit any of these websites (and more) rendering the effort of the music industry useless.
It is because of this, that it is often suggested that the music industry should stop this frivilous banning and focus more on providing a better user experience for the consumers. By doing so, the idea is that it will encourage and attract more people to download music legally. This argument definitely has merrit. In any market where an easy alternative to file sharing has been introduced, piracy has generally gone down. For example in the video game industry, the introduction of Valve’s Steam effectively reduced the piracy of PC games. The same can be seen in the music industry with the introduction of iTunes (and subsequent introduction of Amazon Mp3 and Google Play).
However, even with the existence of user friendly alternatives like iTunes in the music market, piracy is still a prevelant issue. Thus we have to slightly sympathise with the music industry when they try seemingly desperate attempts to stop piracy like banning websites which promote illegal file sharing. I don’t know what the answer is, I’m not even going to pretend like I know. It may simply be that there is nothing the music industry can do to completely, or even effectively, ban piracy because the pirates have proven that they will always be one step ahead.
Sources:
http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article/bpi-to-call-on-courts-to-block-grooveshark/
