In January 2012, the internet fought one of its largest battles since its conception decades ago. Headed by Lamar Smith, the US House of Commons almost accepted the Stop Online Piracy Act (or ‘SOPA’). This act would have rendered sharing copyrighted or even items created not by yourself but aren’t copyrighted a crime punishable by years in prison.

File-sharing giant Megaupload was shut down by the FBI and its administrators were detained. However, netizens would not surrender without a fight. The hacker group Anonymous began taking down the websites of the FBI, Department of Justice, Warner Music, RIAA and more. Petitions were circulated by average citizens and on January 18th, 2012, various websites including Wikipedia, Reddit and 9GAG ‘blacked-out’ their websites in protest. The internet won this time, as over a dozen supporters of the act turned against it, and Lamar Smith retracted the bill from the House of Commons.

This is the thing, Lamar Smith is backed mainly by Hollywood producers and executives, and it’s quite obvious that Lamar Smith was acting on behalf of the Hollywood executives. Yes, it is true that online pirating causes the creators of the show/music to lose large amounts of revenue, but realistically speaking online pirating can not and will probably never be blocked entirely. Instead of trying to achieve the impossible and angering the people even more (many urged others to pirate more media in retaliation), Hollywood could have simply changed their strategy a bit to recover their lost funds.

People pirate due to various reasons, but here are the popular ones

• Buying the media is too expensive
• The media is not yet available (ex: the DVDs are released after each season is over with and people don’t want to wait)
• People are unable to watch a TV show due to time conflicts and do not have a TiVo-like system to record it
• Pirating is convenient

When faced with these problems, it seems that being able to get a show when and where you want it through pirating is a god-send. In this day and age, consumers are spoiled people. We want convenience, and we want to do things our way.

Instead of stupidly butting against an impossible-to-solve ‘problem’, Hollywood executives could have turned to the digital space in order to recoup loses and discourage pirating by making access to the various media even easier than pirating (which usually involves having to torrent download and waiting).

Hollywood executives could create a website (either collectively or by individual production companies)  and put their media content up for streaming on that site. To generate revenue, the sites can run ads before/during the video, much like how YouTube is running them. They can also create the option of letting people pay for ‘premium accounts’ which will be ad-free. This easy access to streaming would be even more catered to the consumer wishes and at the same time, can generate revenue. Even more so, the Hollywood executives will be satisfying consumer needs and wants (much like how TESCO satisfied the Korean market full of busy working people) instead of ‘declaring war’ on their very consumers.

Hollywood, it’s time to wake up and embrace the net. Stopbeing stubborn and think outside the box, it’s for your own good.