Adapt or desist

By Maks Fus Mickiewicz 30 : 06 : 2016 Future Artefacts : Media Futures : Copyright & Piracy

London – Speakers at the latest Future Artefacts talk urged the media business to adapt to consumer piracy behaviour rather than use copyright claims.

Space adventure Interstellar was illegally downloaded 46m times in 2015, according to piracy tracking firm Excipio
A study by SeatSmart, claims rapper Future’s DS2 album was illegally downloaded an average of 3,378 times a day in 2015

Cybersecurity expert Chris Monteiro, Victoria and Albert Museum curator Brendan Cormier and patent litigation expert Matthew Jones joined a panel discussion at Ace Hotel that examined the future of copyright, piracy and appropriation.

‘Piracy is forcing the industry to adapt,’ said Monteiro, referencing services such as Spotify and Netflix as being symbolic of a transitionary period. ‘People value content. They want to see it. It’s up to the industry to work out how to monetise it.’

Jones urged businesses to innovate rather than changing the law to protect their products. ‘In the 1980s everyone thought VHS players would signal the end of cinema,’ he said. ‘Then multiplexes emerged and created their own market with a new experience.’

According to Cormier, the issue of piracy won’t go away any time soon. In a presentation he showed how artists produced an illicit digital copy of the bust of Queen Nefertiti and ancient artefacts, and how Ordinary Architecture is 3D scanning whole environments, as illustrated with their Dar Abu Said project.

The Big Picture

Peer-to-peer file-sharing website BitTorrent has launched BitTorrent Now, a new music- and video-streaming app with a unique library of content that is not available on its competitors’ platforms.