Tag Archives: world

Do Entertainment Companies Need to Fight Piracy?

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Piracy is a puissant parasite of the entertainment business. With 146 million visits on illegal online content a day, piracy takes 22% of all global bandwidth. In music industry alone, piracy is responsible for $12.5 billion economic loss. 95% of all music downloads are illegal. 42% of all software in the world are also illegal. E-book piracy is catching up with 54% increase in demand since August 2009. Yet 70% of internet users find nothing wrong with it.

 

The reason is it’s free, isn’t it?

 

Even with piracy, entertainment companies can still beam at their bank accounts. The global box office hit of 2011 is 7% higher than 2010 with $32.6 billion. It rose to $34.7 billion in 2012, adding 6% more. The global music sale in the same year is $16.5 billion, another increase from 2011. They remained lucrative yet eliminating piracy will definitely payout.

 

Piracy is not totally harmful. Oxford economist Karen Croxson claims that illegal downloads create a buzz and gives unplanned promotions for the product. Asst. Prof. Robert Hammond of North Carolina State University took an interest on studying piracy and found that leaks of albums before its actual release has a sales-boosting effect. Unauthorized access shifts unknown products to familiar brands.

 

Related: Justin Timberlake Made a Fortune Giving His Album Away

 

The benefits of piracy are recognized. Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft Corp’s business division, prefers users to pirate Microsoft products than the competition. It’s the biggest opportunity for people to try the software and then later on buy them. Researchers at University of Texas at Austin cautioned the companies on their anti-piracy campaign as it may repulse poor consumers. The US government agrees that piracy increases brand awareness. In the long run, piracy will contribute sales.

 

Annihilating piracy has been a global effort, yet the demand never ceases. No matter the justification, piracy is stealing. It’s a crime against creation and innovation. Original works deserve compensation.

 

Have you bought a product you once pirated?

Gross National Happiness

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We spend maybe one fourth of our lives learning. Compulsory education exists in all western countries. We’ve all accepted that as a fact. We all understand we need education to find a good-paying job. We’re raised as capitalists, and we don’t mind. Is capitalism the way?

 

Governments are doing what they’re supposed to when they make everyone go to school. They want a country to improve. In order to handle the competition between countries they need to stimulate the competition between people. Some think that governments focus too much on the welfare of the country, rather than on the welfare of the population. But then again, if education makes us capitalists, individual welfare in terms of economics and therefore national welfare should make us happy.

 

In the Western world we measure countries by their gross national product (GNP). If that is a high value, it means that the economic condition is good. We automatically assume that the better the GNP, the higher the quality of living. But we can’t be sure. It’s just that there is no other way of measuring a country’s happiness.

 

That might apply to most countries, but not for Bhutan. They don’t use GNP, but gross national happiness (GNH) as a way of measuring the progress in their country. We think that happiness improves when GNP does; but in Bhutan it is believed that the country improves when GNH does. Those two ways of reasoning are quite the opposite of each other.

 

But we hold on to our way of thinking. It is impossible to change our system so that we don’t care about money anymore. Gross national happiness sounds good, but we don’t believe in it. And how do you measure GNH? So we keep on learning 20 years of our lives, because there is no other way of becoming happier. It would be strange if poor (less intelligent?) people would be happier than rich (intelligent?) people. Therefore we continue our search for money, hoping there’ll be some happiness along the way.