The World Needs More Ninjas

Here’s an interesting article pointing out how a zero tolerance approach to piracy is doomed to fail and the RIAA and MPAA would be better off to just minimize the effects of piracy. The article has an interesting discussion of the possibility of positive economic effects that come from a small amount of piracy. Essentially, prices can be raised since piracy rids the market of the buyers with the smallest purchasing power.

I’m a believer that its better to design systems to minimize a problem rather than trying to get rid of it completely. For example, we’re never going to rid society of drug use, but you can attempt to isolate and minimize the harmful effects. As pointed out here, piracy is always going to exist in the digital age. All it takes is one person willing to spend thousands of dollars on equipment to transfer content to a high-quality non-DRM’d file (even if it’s via an analog channel), an then that file can propagate infinitely after that.