Blog Assignment 5

The first idea to deter piracy that comes to mind is most definitely subscription-based content.  If you look at services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify, you'll find that they have tons of active users.  This is because they pay a monthly price (typically less than $10), and receive large amounts of content.  The way that content producers (bands, TV shows) get money is a monthly payout from the services similar to Hulu or Spotify.  The "middlemen" can also supply the content creators with more accurate statistics about viewers as opposed to TV stations.

Another idea is having a set standard of piracy laws.  A third-party international body could be formed to combat the issue.  They could potentially lay out laws and regulations that countries can choose to adopt if they wanted to fight against piracy.  This one is a shot in the dark though, because it would require massive funding from somewhere.  An example of how this has been difficult in the past is with "The Pirate Bay", which is a popular website to find illegally copied content.  They left when prosecuted from their original country, and kept bouncing around to host their website in different countries as they started being discovered.  An international body could make catching these types of offenders easier.

My third option is changing the file types of commercial media.  Look at modern video games. It's nearly impossible to find copied PS4 or Xbox One games.  This is because the arrangement of file types on the disk (and file types themselves) are extremely complex.  It takes proprietary hardware (the video game console) to be able to read the data on the disk.  If we moved away from the standard mp3 and mp4 file types to something more complex, piracy would decrease because of the learning curve to decode/encode a new file type.