Radio Interview

The following interview from Out-Law Radio, is worth listening to:

Title: Piracy: not the enemy, but the competition,

We talk to an anti-piracy pro who says that content producers should stop trying to stifle piracy and concentrate on competing with it better

To ensure that this interview is given its proper context and is not misunderstood, here is a short extract from Out-Law:

"TV companies, film studios and record labels should spend less time fighting those engaged in piracy and more time competing with them, a leading anti-piracy expert has said.

Dr David Price told technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that many people turn to piracy because officially-sanctioned songs or TV programmes are of poor quality, arrive late or come with restrictions that make them hard to access.

Price is the head of piracy intelligence at Envisional, a company which monitors piracy for content producers.

"There have to be legitimate alternatives, and not just that but they have to be really good legitimate alternatives," he said. "You've got to offer as good a user experience legitimately as people can get through piracy. We can't just offer something that is so restricted that people aren't going to bother."

Price said that many users of piracy services would happily switch to legitimate ones but are attracted by the more usable, more readily-available pirated services.

"Once you get involved in downloading things illegitimately the user experience is so good it's compelling," he said. "You really get high quality content, there are so many advantages to doing it over what you can get legitimately in a wide range of countries."

Companies should learn from pirates, said Price, and embrace some of the methods of distribution they use. He said that Norwegian broadcaster NRK achieved impressive results when it seeded peer-to-peer networks with legitimate copies of one of its hit programmes."

Radio Interview