Copyright

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/fry_on_copyright.html

Some of what Stephen Fry said on copyright echoes an earlier post on this blog. To stay relevant the music and movie industry really needs to take on board the following points; and though there is nothing here that is not intuitive/plain obvious, these appear to be alien concepts to movie and music executives. And for the record, yes piracy is wrong, but that is not your principal problem at this time.

1. Replace your management teams with people who do not regard all of their customers as criminals or potential criminals; surely no business that views its customers as the enemy is going to succeed.
2. Realise that a continuing failure to understand changes both in technology and consumer tastes, are a far greater threat to your long term prospects than piracy. It will take time to re-orientate your business model; trying to wring as much as you can from your customers in the mean time will not bode well for the longer term.
3. Put in as much effort into addressing the needs of your paying customer base, as you have into patronizing advertising and PR campaigns that have only served to alienate you from all consumers.
4. Appreciate that consumers are willing to pay for digital downloads, but also accept that they are not stupid; they know that downloads should be cheaper than physical media, and they will no longer pay above the odds for music and film (the price of new DVDs and CDs is still exorbitant - and is why sales of physical media will continue to fall). Your short termism on pricing will keep downloads as a niche market, while slowly suffocating sales of physical media; this is not optimal.
5. Try to re-build a relationship based upon trust with your customers; people are more likely to see piracy as wrong if they are well disposed towards you, just as they are more likely to buy your product if they don't think that you are constantly trying to fleece them.
6. Revisit the whole issue of DRM for digital video; people who want to obtain pirated movies can do so with the minimum of effort; so exactly what purpose does DRM serve (other than to annoy your paying customers)? Make it easy for me to buy a DVD and rip it into a format of my choosing (since I have already paid for it). You may point to the fact that you have already done this with music, but that move was initially made to give Amazon a competitive advantage over iTunes, and when that failed, it was used as leverage to force higher music prices from Apple. This should not have been why you abolished music DRM, and it showed that you had in fact learnt nothing.