Entertainment Industry Should Understand Economy

Another research confirms that file-sharing is generally limited in both North America and Europe, but is still on the rise across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East. Industry observers called piracy “progressive taxation”, which can be considered a great theory reproducing the nowadays situation.

In this particular research it is said that the problem is actually not piracy but pricing. In other words, pricing can’t put any discernment into the strategies of the music industry, because it makes no difference between West and its less-wealthy neighbors. However, these weren’t problems that concerned the Recording Industry Association of America, because the outfit was too busy suing people and organizations within the United States. Back in 2008, the outfit took a decision to drop its strategy of mass lawsuits and switched to pushing Internet service providers into spying their own subscribers to stop piracy.

Yet, the actions of the music industry were of little success thus far, as well as based on the assumption that its targets were faulty. Meanwhile, the recent research showed that around 10% of North Americans appeared to use file-sharing services in the last three months, but the figure was approximately 20% at the European Union.

Nevertheless, on-the-rise economies of developing countries (Latin America - 45%, Asia-Pacific - 42%, and Middle East and Africa - 41%) constitute a larger piece of pie in the file-sharing community. The question is whether the world can be comprised of thieves according to these numbers, or the attention should be drawn to the economic and technological differences between developed and developing countries?

Major part of those who really infringe copyright respond to little more than a letter demanding to take the content offline. The servers that ignore the entertainment industry’s requests are generally located in countries where the books are unavailable for sale or are too expensive for ordinary people to buy. For example, in Russia the average salary is $500 a month, while the books cost sometimes more expensive than in the US – each good textbook is around $30, which the part-working students or their parents can hardly afford. As for the elderly people, their pension is $200 a month – and you have to take your time and calculate it out how to survive on this money, not what books to buy. These are official numbers, you can goggle them and the prices in shops of developing countries (and better visit them) before taking a final decision on which side to take. That’s what the industry should de as well before blaming China and Russia for all its woes. At the same time, the industry stubbornly refuses to understand that the simplest way to make customers stop sharing illegal content is to offer them a legitimate alternative, at a fair price.