The Technology and Games section of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website has published a fairly long article called “The case for piracy.” In this article, Nick Ross looks at some of the reasons people feel driven to pirate.
The article doesn’t actually touch on e-books per se—the majority of it seems to be about how badly Australian TV mangles imported TV shows and does not show international sports events live, though there are a couple of sections about the music and movie industries too—but the sort of media producer indifference (or even, as the article puts it, “contempt”) toward its customers it discusses will be familiar to a lot of e-book readers.
Ross explains at the end that the article is meant “to describe and inform—not endorse any infringement,” but it certainly seems to be doing so implicitly if not explicitly. And this article is posted to a major media outlet in Australia..
I wonder if piracy could ever be seen as a force to bring about reform in the content industries—to knock the idea into their heads that they should do a better job serving their customers so they don’t drive people to less legal alternatives?
It’s probably too much to hope for.
(Found via Slashdot.)
It’s even bigger than that. ABC is government-owned and independently run. So it’s not just a post of a major media outlet – it’s a post by a government-owned media outlet. Of course, disclaimers, and not the views of my employer, and all that, but still…
It isn’t a defense of piracy really, more a robust shredding of a business model that fails to deliver to consumers what they want and are (generally) prepared to pay for.