It seems theres a hunting season for online Pirates going strong right now. First, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) have send a letter to the Swedish government. Pushing them to take action against Pirate Bay, after finding out they distribute videos from the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. IOC claim the copy right for the opening ceremony have tremendous value (which I have a hard time understanding), and what the Swedish government to help them getting the videos down from the site. Well, their not the only one who want stuff on Piratebay down.
Next up is an assault against British game pirates. Five game developers have sent out warnings to 25000 people, pay or get sued. The amount they have to pay isn’t huge, just 300 pound (GBP), it seems to be a new tactics. Reach many, and still make their wallets hurt. Usually in media its been the movie and record industry battling the pirates and their download sites. But the gaming industry are starting more raptly to counter the sharing of games illegally, specially in the PC segment. Speculations have indicated this to be one of the reasons why many developers focus on console development. Still, reports show the PC gaming market is stronger than previously believed. Much thanks to “new” online revenue streams. One way to cope with illegal game-sharing have been developing new business-model, especially strong faith in the free-to-play model. Although its important for the Western market to embrace and adapt to a model more built around in-game ads and micro transactions, it may not be the best solution for the industry as a whole.
“We must get away from the idea of new business models as the only solution to the pirate problem. It is misleading. We have to deal with copyright infringement. It is not about protecting an outdated physical distribution, but to protect the new, legal digital alternatives.”
- Per Strömbäck from Dataspelsbranschen. Source DN.se
The only segment that seems happy about PC piracy is the hardware manufactures, but not official that is. People can spend more money on hardware if they don’t pay for games?
[Update]
EA Sports boss Peter Moore raise a warning to the video game companies threating to sue people who file-share. Comparing this with the failure for the record industry’s attempt at the same thing.
“I’m not a huge fan of trying to punish your consumer,” he said. “Albeit these people have clearly stolen intellectual property, I think there are better ways of resolving this within our power as developers and publishers.
And the last news concerning piracy revolves around the site Mygazines.com. Focused on uploading and sharing physical magazines from allover the world, for everyone to easy and free view and read. Well, it was just meant to steer up some angry magazine publishers! But it seems the publishers of big US magazines have run into trouble. Since the site is hosted outside of the US there will be problem to get to them. For now the site have escaped the long arm of the law.
But for some magazines this could be a great opportunity. Magazines usually make most of its money from advertisement, the more people reading, the better for advertisers. There are many more great advantages with this model. The technology is already developed. The work of scanning and editing the pages are done by fans, not by the publishers. You get a much bigger distributions channel! You can (in theory and if you could like) make the magazine measurable. Imagen be able to track how many read/watch a page, zooming and for how long they watch. And just thing of how much paper we can save by reducing the physical copy of the Ikea catalog in digital format.
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