The Swedish Pirate Party had their day in court last week.
Formed in 2006 the party defends the actions of illegal online file sharers – and is now a worldwide group. The case is interesting because it highlights the clash of ideas between content producers and a new generation of people across the globe who view all digital content as free.
Newspapers, authors, designers, and most of all the music industry, have been fighting copyright infringement for years now, and it’s not surprising given the earthquake it represents to their revenue streams.
In one corner we have a group of consumers, represented by the Pirate Parties, who argue that content should be free and that the big bad music industry has been conspiring to keep music prices artificially high for years. One the other side, the music industry maintains that it will vigorously defend copyright infringement.
The stand-off has escalated over the years with major acts such as Metallica funding US law suits against file sharing (and reaping a huge backlash and PR disaster in the process) and successive legal actions throughout Europe.
Indeed the issue of digital sharing certainly isn’t taking place in a vacuum, but rather is taking centre stage in the future of how businesses operate in the digital economy.
Chris Anderson and the concept of ‘Free’
One of the world’s most influential thinkers Chris Anderson, believes that the old business order is being rocked to its core by the new emphasis on free goods – everything from flights to music tracks. He argues that this era has become possible because of developments in digital technologies and the internet and in his book ‘Free’ talks about the industries he thinks will prosper and those that will die in this brave new old.
So what does this have to do with Swedish Pirates and file sharing? One of the main points that Chris Anderson makes is that companies should actually embrace the fact that online content sharing exists, join the trend and start to build their business revenue around the music acts by making money through more concerts, ringtones, limited editions etc.
For him it’s a logic issue and points to the fact that in China, for instance, “piracy accounts for 95% of the consumption of music so why try to make money from selling plastic discs, when you can make the money in other ways?" So the next step for content owners, he argues, is to actually embrace the people pirating their material!
‘Free’ and business reality
It’s here that you can start to see why his theory on ‘Free’ starts to comes under pressure. Anderson maintains that “knock-off handbags and pirated MP3s aren’t parasites but tomorrow’s sales force”. To which I can hear a chorus of business people would shout ‘No, they’re breaking copyright law in nearly every country on earth – they’re parasites.’
Sometimes I do have a problem with many of the ‘new economy’ business thinking in recent years because sometimes they maintain that the laws of economics are going to get turned on their head. The Free model supposes that business elites don’t or can’t stop a lot of the blatant copyright infringement - but they can, hence the raft of copyright cases across the US and Europe. In business, as in life, people always protect their interests.
But perhaps illegal file sharing and the concept of ‘Free’ are part of an unstoppable trend by a younger generation, the sons and daughters of baby boomers, who just don’t want to pay for things like that! As a group they have very considerable consumer power and a close affinity with online file sharers.
Their hero defendants in the Pirate court case have been warned they could receive a three-year jail sentence, rather than walk free. Which sounds very ‘old world’ and not very Swedish.
