“Yo, ho, haul together,

never shall we die.”

Let’s be clear from the start: piracy is a plague. The world would be better off without it, and I condemn it completely.

However! There are, to my mind, interesting lessons that can be learned from piracy, lessons that could change, in the long run, the panorama of music and video industries.

“Haul together, never shall we die”. Though, I admit, the reference to Pirates of the Caribbean is a bit dodgy, it nevertheless illustrates that piracy is a massive phenomenon that has always existed and will continue to exist. In response to this phenomenon, music and video industry majors have reacted, understandably, by raising barriers and making it harder to pirate material. Needless to say these efforts have always been followed by corresponding hacks allowing to overthrow protection. So on one side we have companies investing, often heavily, to try to protect material, and on the other side we have an unidentified mass of hackers working freely to allow an even broader mass of pirates to have access to music and video. It seems to be a lost battle for industry majors, but they really have no choice if they want to make at least some money.

But does someone have a choice?

The problem with digital media, the majors claim, is that it can be easily copied and distributed for free. It is certainly a problem for companies that actually make money by copying and distributing. However, companies are not alone, for we have not yet mentioned the central characters here.

The artists themselves. Yes, of course they suffer from piracy, but it seems to me that they suffer only because they rely too heavily on the industry as it is today –i.e. roughly as it already was before the digital era arrived. It is astonishing that such a dramatic technical revolution has had this little impact on the industry organisation. Artists now have technically all the necessary means to make their creations available to the entire planet without putting a single penny on the table –apart from the actual production costs.

A whole world of possibilities is open, for those who stop a minute to think out of the box (to name one, sellaband.com, for instance). Imagination has rarely been scarce for business models, and the spur of piracy should, well, spur the mutation of the music and video industries.

So artists, if you want to make a CD, go ahead, but you’re warned: it WILL be pirated. Industry majors, if you wish to continue making them, go ahead, but they WILL be pirated.

It’s high time to stop whining about the whole situation, and get a move on, create, make money in unexplored ways, and, since it cannot be eradicated by fighting it, keep Piracy to the 20^th century by making it obsolete.