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Democracy & Technology Blog Combating online piracy with better and more convenient legitimate services

Hance Haney
November 14, 2014
Featured, Intellectual Property

The motion picture industry has established a search site to help consumers find non-pirated movies and TV shows available on the Internet: WheretoWatch.com.

A study by NetNames estimated that 23.8% of all the bandwidth consumed in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific in January 2013 was used to access pirated content.

There are more than 100 legal online services offering movie and television content in the U.S., according to Chairman and CEO Senator Chris Dodd of the Motion Picture Association of America, and a study by KPMG found that 94% of the most popular and critically acclaimed films were legally available online in December 2013.

In the opinion of Google, which has taken steps including downranking (in search results) sites that generate a large number of removal notices pursuant to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act,

Piracy often arises when consumer demand goes unmet by legitimate supply. As services ranging from Netflix to Spotify to iTunes have demonstrated, the best way to combat piracy is with better and more convenient legitimate services. The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory will do far more to reduce piracy than enforcement can.

WheretoWatch.com is an important step in that direction, however it’s hard to compete with free. Both enforcement and convenient legitimate sources are needed to combat digital piracy.

Hance Haney

Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project
Hance Haney served as Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute, in Washington, D.C. Haney spent ten years as an aide to former Senator Bob Packwood (OR), and advised him in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Communications Subcommittee during the deliberations leading to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He subsequently held various positions with the United States Telecom Association and Qwest Communications. He earned a B.A. in history from Willamette University and a J.D. from Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.