The trick to combating piracy is to make things cheap enough that people won’t bother to go through the hassle of piracy and monitoring, while still making enough money per sale or stream to stay in business.

Why do people pirate? One reason is because they can, another reason is because even at low prices some people just don’t want to open their wallets.

Heck, if things were free, some people would still find a reason to pirate, probably so their viewing habits are not tracked by some large corporation, or so that ads inserted into various points of a stream can be completely avoided.

Some people just want to build a massive collection of content and have it in the format of their choice, able to play back on whatever device they want.

Other reasons are because a pirate copy is free of all the warnings, potential trailers and other guff you get on legal product, as well as region-lock restrictions on some forms of physical media.

Another reason is because prices are cheaper in various jurisdictions overseas, making some people think ‘well why should I pay more’.

None of that is to excuse piracy in the slightest - it’s against the law and we certainly do not condone it, but again, the trick is finding the right balance while making sure every part of the content production process gets enough of a cut to make the continued production of quality content worthwhile.

The trick is also to make sure piracy is reduced as much as possible by making it so easy, convenient and affordable to buy or stream legally that the vast majority of people just won't bother with torrents, seeding, overuse of broadband allowances through P2P oversharing of illegally download content - and to avoid viruses, fake video players that install malware, a litany of popups and all the rest that illegal content downloaders put themselves through just to save a few bucks.  

And that is one heck of a couple of tricks, especially when local distributors who are used to getting their piece of the pie will eventually one day find themselves cut out of the loop as consumers seek to buy direct from the content makers themselves or some giant content aggregation service that operates on a global basis.

Piracy is in the news not only because of the Federal Government’s desire to track everyone’s Internet activities for two years, even if this can be circumvented by an overseas VPN, but also because of a report from the Communications Alliance.

CommsWire Editor and iTWire colleague Graeme Philipson covered that story here.

In that story, we’re told that the Communications Alliance report showed 55% of Aussies ‘agree that illegal downloads are a problem in Australia’ as people realise that if local content producers are being hard hit by piracy.

60% of the survey respondents were of the opinion that a simultaneous global release of content to all regions would help lower piracy.

And 66% of Australians think that if ‘cheaper, fairer pricing’ was offered’, people would not download illegally, although of course the obvious flip-side of that stat goes to my comments above whereby even if legal content was available at a cheaper price, it would seem 34% believe piracy would continue happening anyway.

Consumers are also concerned that if monitoring of their Internet connections go through, they'll be forced to pay higher ISP prices, which could well have the effect of encouraging more people to pirate as they suddenly have less money in their pockets each month - what one hand giveth to ISPs, the other hand taketh away from another source as it were. 

You can read more at Graeme’s article here, while a summary of the Communications Alliance report in PDF format is available to download here.