Oscar Winners Pirated Massively, Could Learn From Kanye West's Mistakes

Piracy of movies and music remains rampant, and artists can’t really stop it. Nor can last night’s Academy Award winners, because most nominated movies were leaked online way before the ceremony anyway. Award screener versions of Spotlight, winner for Best Picture, and of runner-up The Revenant, were leaked last Christmas. Mad Max: Fury Road was the most pirated movie last summer. Altogether, award winners have already been downloaded hundreds of millions of times.

Can this massive piracy of award winners ever be stopped? No, but to reduce piracy studios should consider giving consumers better options to conveniently buy or rent a copy at a reasonable price. To bring the point across, let's first examine how by not doing so, Kanye West's album The Life of Pablo (TLOP) was pirated massively around its launch in mid-February.

First, there were technical snafus around the release of TLOP. West decided to release the album only on Tidal, a music streaming service owned by musician and entrepreneur Jay Z. But Tidal failed to prepare for the high volume of anticipated interest, so congestion also led to slow or partial downloads. The launch itself was also streamed 0n Tidal, but millions of requests led to congestion and streaming problems.

Second, the album was not available as promised. West briefly offered a paid download of the album on his website, then recanted – but not before reports surfaced that numerous people paid their $20 for the album but were unable to download TLOP. Even after being made available on Tidal, the album apparently wasn’t complete, as West suggested some additional songs were works in progress.

There is nothing wrong with exclusive launches to promote an album or a streaming service. But those who paid for the album or the Tidal subscription and then couldn’t stream the launch or download the full album showed their dissatisfaction by turning to piracy sites like The Pirate Bay and other file-sharing sites, where it was downloaded and shared in droves.

I do not condone illegal consumption of content. I have argued it's an indefensible crime and recently quantified the damages for award-winning movies. But the launch of TLOD exemplifies the arrogance around traditional distribution of artistic work. By making content exclusive and expensive, studios and labels insist on the outdated premise of the pre-digital era, that they alone will set the market price and the conditions of the launch. Yet in this digital era, the more expensive is the content and the more restricted the release, the higher will be its illegal consumption.

There is some evidence that less pricey and more convenient streaming services are making at least a dent in piracy. One market research analysis notes, “ Netflix  has also been creative with its approach to piracy by using it for data mining. The company will track pirating sites, and target popular shows for its own content library in an attempt to convert pirates into Netflix customers. The company has also seen dramatic declines in traffic on BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing platform, once it enters new markets. In Canada, for instance, the company said BitTorrent traffic had fallen by half in the three years after it launched there.”

Given that the option to provide content for free is neither fair nor workable – after all, none of us work for free -- is the answer legal action? Kanye seems to think so. He’s already threatened and appears to be moving forward with legal action (The Pirate Bay’s response: good luck with that).

And previous efforts to shut down piracy sites may be enough to temporarily stall them, but not enough to permanently shut them down. Last year, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sued and closed down popular pirate site Popcorn Time. On November 3, 2015, Popcorn Time defiantly tweeted, “hey internets, apparently @MPAA thinks we're dead, are we?” then promptly went radio silent.

But On Valentine’s Day 2016, Popcorn Time resurfaced under a different URL "in beta" with a bold Tweet: “Netflix, this may be a little silly, but I have a question for you, will you be my Valentine? I know you have a boyfriend #Motion Picture Association of America. But will you be my Valentine?”

While the industry seeks legal remedies, it should also be examining models in which it can supply content like movies and songs more rapidly and conveniently, at a cost low enough to compete with piracy. Less popular movies could be made available for download at the same time as in theaters, for a nominal price ($3?). Or Kanye’s next album could be offered for $10 per download on major sites that can handle the traffic. Yes, there will be losers under both of those scenarios, but one of them will be piracy sites.

There are of course, less extreme options to compete with piracy while minimizing cannibalization of precious box office and digital revenues. There should be a sweet spot that optimizes revenue gains against losses to piracy, especially for award winning movies that are big in the box office but are also prime targets for illegal consumption. For example, studios could release top movies digitally weeks after theater release (instead of months) and offer downloads for less than $10 to compete with pirates.

Either way, it’s time for artists, studios, and labels to stop digging their heads in the sand and instead, treat piracy as a low-cost competitor (albeit illegal and informal).