I remembered when I was in Egypt and advised my ex-employer to add DRM product; LockLizard; to our security products portfolio. I remember my reasons behind this at this time. At this time the content providers in Egypt was giving access to users who access the internet through their dial-up number, and they didn’t have any kind of control on content distribution afterwards. I thought by having a DRM product we can give Egyptian content providers a proper solution that can control content distribution and increases customer volume which; as I thought; will increase their profit and growth. There is no need anymore to restrict access to internet dial-up number. You can imagine how it is quite annoying from end-user prospective to switch between internet dial-up numbers to get access to needed content. Accidentally, I was reading “Ongoing Innovation in Digital Watermarking” and “How Viable Is Digital Rights Management?” in IEEE computer magazine. The two articles are great and show history and current trends in Digital Rights Management and why some companies move to naked digital rights management ;as Rajan Samtani called it; like Amazon, Sony BMG and iTunes store. So, why movie producers still fighting piracy till now?
I thought like most of you that is because they are losing money and threaten filmmaker industry as mentioned in Washington Post , this article on helium.com and others went further by saying it is used for fund raising to drug dealings and terrorist groups.
Does it worth keeping this fight?
Let’s look at it from business point of view. Based on product life-cycle theory profit achieved in the beginning of the product for a period of time till market saturated, after that the profit starts to reduce as shown in this diagram. That is mean declined profit is the norm in globalised business in 21st century. I’m pretty sure filmmakers knew that more than me.
Today Pirate Bay founders sent to jail for supporting file-sharing and allow users to download music files and movies for free. I’m not supporting illegal file-sharing. But, I don’t understand why they still keep fighting piracy; I don’t think it worth effort anymore. They need to change current business model to keep growth and profit on.
References: Watermarking systems Engineering Good Copy Bad Copy
