May 10, 2006

Piracy Legalized!

Does anyone forget Napster? Kazaa? Weren't they ripped off their business for ripping & sharing some protected music between peers? Well, have things changed in 5 years? Pretty much yes, I guess! It's time to see things a bit different! The current business outlook is like 'Why do we stand as opponents, when we can be more effective as a team?'!

People are not talking about music downloads anymore. It's a much faster market, broader bandwidths, high speed internet and we are for bits & bytes of whole movies in our computers. When Napster can be pulled down, when free music downloaders can be arrested, my thoughts were like its going to be the same case with this new Video download market too! I mean, if someone is supporting free download of Protected Videos, they will eventually end up facing copyrights charges! Right? Wrong!

From last month, MovieLink.com started selling the latest movies of Universal, MGM & Sony as online downloads. Sweet! Likewise, Fox started using iTunes to help watchers downloads its TV shows. Cool! Now, the other Hollywood Productions have to catch up to get their movies into the download world. So, what did Warner Bros do? Something I, rather no one would have anticipated I guess. A great business move - A partnership with BitTorrent! Now, haven't things changed a lot? Make the online video market more copyright friendly but don't pull the Anti-CopyRight BitTorrent servers off the network!

BitTorrent has a great user base of Video downloaders and watchers. So, what Warner Bros have done has excellent value. But, are the target audience ready for this? I doubt it! The user base we are talking about is the one who want red-tagged video downloads marked 'FREE'! They never wanted the DRM copies to crawl in their systems attached with someother price tag. They are guilt consious too but who cares! This move sure is going to turn away some customers from BitTorrent, but this initiation is done in the right direction and has a long way to go!

It's a wait & watch market, Bros!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i tell u jags, there's nothing as gud as piracy. i, myself buy a lot of pirated cds. who'll buy original cds that are sooooo expensive. pirated cds are much more easily available and are cheaper. tell me honestly, do u buy original stuff or pirated.

Jagan M Narayanan said...

Well, here is the difference between u & me! I'm in US & u r in India. In US, people track IPs - Teens have got arrested when copyright music was downloaded for free. So, do u think I'm gonna welcome trouble?

Anonymous said...

well, actually you are right. In India pirated stuff is most easily available and legal(or illegally legal) coz there is a big market called palika bazar where u get pirated stuff on every shop. its in the knowledge of everyone, yet no action has been taken to stop it. its been here for years and its here to be. so say"INDIA IS THE BEST".