The online piracy debate supplies central casting villains for all sides. On the one hand, Rupert Murdoch. When the Obama administration objected to granting the authorities power to make offending websites disappear (?domain name system blocking?), Murdoch tweeted this grotesque exaggeration: ?Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters.? Then you have the operators of The Pirate Bay file-sharing website. They offer the childish bragthat because they don?t actually store stolen content, it is ?not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible? for stealing. Someone, please lock these people in a room together.
There is agreement on one point. Content producers need to make it easier for consumers to be legitimate customers. How well this will work depends on the type of content.
A solution is already at hand for older, or ?tail?, video content: Netflix makes money and writes big cheques to movie and TV studios. The revenues of the music industry have shrunk by half during the past decade, but a recent resurgence in sales volumes shows that services such as iTunes and Spotify are helping. Software is a harder case. Apple makes its software harder to steal by bundling it up with fancy hardware, but even it has to spend loads of time and money suing suspected infringers. High-cost, high-end content, like first-run movies and live sporting events, may be the hardest case of all.
There is no economic law promising that a valuable and productive business, however clever and forward-thinking, will be able to protect itself when thieves provide free or cheap access to its products. Keeping a lid on piracy is likely to become a lot like garbage pick-up, or stopping drink-driving: an endless effort against a perennial problem, where some degree of government involvement is inevitable.
? The Financial Times Limited 2012