Hollywood Wants To Kill Piracy? No Problem: Just Offer Something Better

from the and-watch-people-go-away dept

Just John points us to a recent Reddit thread, in which a rather basic suggestion is made for how Hollywood could do a much better job killing movie piracy: by offering something better. It was summarized with the following graphic: Or, basically, create a service that doesn't limit people and offers them what they want, in a convenient manner, at a reasonable price. Simple. Except... that's just not how the MPAA works. As we've stated many times in the past, services like Spotify have massively shrunk how much people in Sweden use The Pirate Bay for music. They now use it for other media, because no one's really created a "Spotify for movies." In fact, whenever the industry seems to get close to creating a good product for video -- see: Hulu or Netflix -- the industry then freaks out that it's going to cannibalize their old way of doing things, and tries to make it worse. It's why the big studios have been pulling content from both services, and trying to limit what they can provide. And that's exactly the wrong thing to do. That's how you encourage more piracy.

Filed Under: better, drm, movies, streaming

Some Proactive Thoughts On Making Newspapers Better

from the build-community,-sell-scarcity dept

Last week, in discussing my debate about newspaper online business models with the NY Times' David Carr, one of our commenters wanted more actual examples of what newspapers should do. Luckily, an anonymous commenter put up some ideas and some suggestions on how to structure a news business. Meanwhile, over the weekend, Steve Yelvington posted a nice list of seven keys to building healthy online community, which newspapers should mostly follow (my one quibble: I think he's wrong to deny anonymous commenting). But most of the other stuff in there makes a lot of sense, and includes things that newspapers rarely do, such as giving the users more power, participating in the community, and even just recognizing that the community is a priority.

Then, Mathew Ingram points us to a list from Dan Gillmor about things he would do if he ran a news organization, most of which focus (also) on involving the community a lot more. The whole list is worth reading, but one thing I really liked was the idea of including a box with each article that includes "Things We Don't Know" with an invitation for readers to fill in some of the blanks. So, along those lines, we certainly don't know "the answer" to news business models (as if there is a single answer), but would love to hear more ideas in the comments.

Filed Under: better, community, journalism, newspapers