By E. Patrick Neer | Echo
While they may not wear peg legs or roam the Caribbean in search of Spanish gold, a new breed of pirates are sweeping the globe. According to a study by NetNames, a British brand protection firm, the number of these pirates continues to grow, to 436 million unique pirates in January 2013 alone. This was a nearly 10 percent increase since 2011. NetNames found that nearly a quarter of Internet users in Europe, North America and the Asian-Pacific region explicitly sought copyright-infringing material in January 2011.
Even with the advent of legal streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify, the tide of online piracy continues to rise.
"Over 300 million people infringed copyright at least once," said David Price, director of piracy analysis at NetNames. "That's an enormous number of people. It just shows how embedded this particular activity has become in people's lives."
With all signs indicating online piracy is a trend that will continue to grow, the question becomes one of impact. What does piracy mean for the future of the entertainment industry?
A study and policy brief released by the London School of Economics and Political Science found that online piracy, far from withering the creative industries, has had a positive effect on business. The study points out that while there has been a marked decrease in sales of recorded music since 2004-a fact much trumpeted by the music industry as the fault of online copyright violation-the total revenue of the music industry has remained remarkably stable.
The statistics of precipitous decline reported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce don't hold up. The music industry hasn't been experiencing
much growth either, sitting at an annual revenue of around $60 billion for the past four years. All the revenue lost in record sales was made up in concert and publishing revenue. In fact, even in other entertainment industries, the claims of devastation by piracy have proven overblown.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), another proponent of vilifying piracy, broke global box office revenue in 2013, bringing in $35 billion.
With many industry heads cracking down on any online access to their copyrighted work, there are those who have chosen to embrace the collaborative on-demand model that the Internet has fostered. Monty Python of British comedy fame created a channel on YouTube in 2008 featuring high definition uploads of its sketches. With everything available for free, Monty Python took the power out of piracy by providing its content on its own terms. The pay-off? Sales of Monty Python DVDs on Amazon, linked from the YouTube channel, have increased by an incredible 23,000 percent.
"For three years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube," stated Monty Python's channel on its "About" page. "Now the tables are turned. . . . We're letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return . . . we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years."
