Virgin Media anti-piracy: who’s the crook now, eh?!
Virgin Media is looking to emulate the ‘French model’ of anti-piracy, big-label protective measures, which sees persistent (three strikes) offenders warned and then kicked off the network. This is old hat stuff but a complex issue. In the post below I make the case that society needs to be wary/cynical towards this announcement - moreso than our castrate mainstream media. Here’s why:
Firstly, I take issue with the deliberately misleading, but unfortunately mainstream, assumption that music pirates are costing the music industry (as opposed to major music labels) serious amounts of cash. Many (not all!) music pirates spend vast amounts of money on music - you can see the results of my ad hoc study as they come in, here and here. These pirates just don’t spend it on the big releases from major labels, mainly because having access to vast (shared) libraries of music means you can find the obscure records you REALLY like. They also spend a lot of money on concerts, merchandise, and within specialist distribution platforms that big labels have yet to get into bed with, like eMusic. An argument could be made that the iPod and the iTunes Music Store have destroyed just as much big label revenue as piracy, as I’ve argued before on this blog (it relates to falling single prices and the death of the album format).
The second issue to consider is whether protecting music labels really is Virgin Media’s concern. Its role in society, as an ISP, is to serve up internet connectivity, and obey our democratic government. Until the elected government specifically deputises ISPs as an extension of the policing infrastructure of the state, Virgin Media should not be policing certain uses of its connectivity, but not others - if it is the ISP’s legal requirement to police its traffic for infringement of our democratically asserted laws, then it should do so. But this measure only covers ONE potential illegal use of the IS (internet service) - and it just so happens to be the only one that lies counter to the commercial interests of the traditional media industry.
So, having established that this reeks of commercially-motivated hypocrisy, briefly mentioning the moral point of whether the ISP should be looking at what a person’s internet is being used for (this isn’t the first time Virgin Media has demonstrated extremely loose morals regarding its users’ privacy - it is as an early adopter of Phorm, which reports our browsing habits to an external company so that it can serve targeted ads), one should ask - what IS the commercial motivation? Virgin Media risks losing customers because of this, so what’s in it for the corporation? Here are some possibilities:
- It is being blackmailed by the music / assorted media companies that supply it with content for its On-Demand IPTV/cable platform; they could pull all the music videos, films and TV that stock VM’s VOD service
- It is being blackmailed by music labels who are threatening to sue (and VM feels they have a case to make or that it would be too costly to fight them)
- It is sucking up to the government. Remember, the government said in February that it would implement legislation by April next year unless ISPs came to a voluntary agreement with the music and film industries. The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is apparently due to publish a consultation paper in April outlining legal measures. Maybe by being the ‘goodie two-shoes’ by jumping in first, Virgin Media is earning OFCOM favours that could really help it in the upcoming spectrum auction (after analog TV switchoff in 2011), or in the government’s plans for a refresh of the UK’s internet backbone evolution.
- It could be commercially beneficial to kick pirates off its network to free up bandwidth for more moderate users (i.e. free up VM from its infrastructure commitments to its ‘all you can eat’ subscribers). This policy gives it the wherewithal to do so. With that said, I wonder if pirate movies are a bigger drain on bandwidth - so why the focus on music? Or is that just a press misconstrual of VM’s specific targets
Related:
- Should new media actually try to compete with piracy?
- Spoke to some interesting people at the ContentNext mixer earlier tonight. Of particular interest were some guys from the film distribution industry, not just because it's something I did some strategy work on in 2007, but because these are the guys (LOVEFiLM et al) that are really suffering from media piracy, no matter what they do (despite this, Amazon is reportedly taking a very strong interest in the aforementioned company). They're stuck between pirates who refuse to pay for content, and film studios (publishers) that are used to scarcity selling (shifting low units relative to what could potentially be achieved with the Internet as a distribution network, at high margins) and refuse to drop wholesale prices to LOVEFiLM etc. The emergent call from the anti-RIAA crowd (Andrew Orlowski of The Register calls them, or us rather, "freetards") is 'don't punish, compete!' But a moment's reflection suggests that that may be a fool's errand. Firstly, how on earth do you compete with the following: Free! Huge catalogs of content on demand - every rarity Available in the format you want (or the open source/freeware tools to convert it) - e.g. losssless audio (FLAC) Leaked content available before it hits cinemas...
- What’s to come: the future of social media consumption
- With broadband penetration (and capacity) increasing, and music devices increasingly connected to WiFi (iPod Touch, iPhone) or to 3G (Nokia's big music push; laptops), the general consensus is that the future lies in media streaming, not the traditional stored music collections (be it shelves of LPs, stacks of CDs and DVDs, or hard drives full of mp3s and DiVX). A few years from now, you and all your friends will be consuming music online, on demand, from a myriad of different sources. If you use Mozilla Songbird, you can already pull in all the music posted on music blogs and Hype Machine into an iTunes-like virtual music library. Even more than infinite diversity of on demand music, the killer app for free (probably ad-supported) streaming media is that anyone can access it from anywhere in the world - they just need a link to it (unlike the mp3's on your iPod). That's the simple little thing that suggests we're in for a REVOLUTION in the way we consume and discover music. The logic is simple: Someone will setup a service which, when you stream music or a video anywhere on the web, will alert all your friends (that have signed...
- Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma
- In the video above, Matt Mason explains the value of piracy to a bunch of trad media suits. He credits pirate radio as a crucible for new music trends and as breaking grounds for new music DJs - an important counterpoint to commercial radio stations like Kiss 100 and Capital FM (in London). I don't disagree with Matt about the importance of pirate radio. Kiss was once a pirate radio station. But he misses the point - innovation isn't an inherent property of music piracy. Case in point - new bands aspire for airplay on (BBC) Radio 1, not your local pirate radio - because Radio 1 launches talent, not piracy. Matt gives piracy too much credit, missing the broader force that piracy is a part of - nonmarket production. Like pirate radio, BBC Radio 1 isn't market-motivated. THAT'S why it can take risks on underground talent, new music forms (future trends, or not - they don't care). Publicly-owned services, the pirate underground, nonprofits and transient crowd 'flashmob' initiatives are not driven by the same motivations as Kiss and Capital - and that's where the benefit to society lies. Matt's defence of piracy is flawed in that it speaks...
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