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How to discourage piracy amongst a small community?

  • Seeking ideas for discouraging piracy of a DVD which has a small potential audience of only a few thousand, well-connected people. A friend has just made his first proper video production of an amateur motor racing competition in Australia. There are four major meets each year, and he is hoping to sell a DVD of each directly to many of the competitors. Nobody has tried to do this before. He is already well known in the particular racing community, has excellent marketing opportunities (he operates the biggest relevant online social networking / forum in Australia) and has a good-looking online storefront. His earlier 2-minute YouTube videos were very well-received, which encouraged him to purchase much better equipment and dedicate much more time to editing a professional-looking production, complete with driver interviews, onscreen results tables, legally-sourced music, etc. Having seen his all-but-completed first DVD we are very confident that it will completely exceed most people's expectations. My big concern, however, is that whilst most of the racing community will be very impressed by it, and will be very keen to watch the DVDs, they won't necessarily feel compelled to pay for them... There is a photographer who makes a decent living by selling CDs of photos of competitors at each meeting. But the photographer creates individual CDs, so that the only way for a person to see lots of photos of themselves is to buy a CD. Creating individual DVDs isn't practical, so my friend is going to have to try and sell the same DVD to everybody, many of whom are going to be quite good friends. And because it takes a lot of time for one person to create a snappy hour-long package from three days worth of footage, there is going to be an inevitable two-week delay between the race meeting and the DVD being available. There are enough competitors -- with more than enough disposable income -- who will really enjoy the DVDs that this should be a success. But obviously if a sizeable proportion of the competitors choose to wait until a mate burns them a copy of the DVD, a segment turns up on YouTube or a full-length torrent appears, then my friend might not sell enough DVDs to make it worth his effort. And then there simply won't be any more DVDs made. In short I'm convinced that as a group the motor racing community will really want my mate to earn enough money to want to keep making more DVDs. But I'm not sure how he should best encourage each of them individually to do the right thing. If Hollywood can't find a technological solution for this problem my mate certainly won't be able to. So I suspect his best hope is to appeal to people's honesty. But I'd be very keen to hear any suggestions of how best to go about this.

  • Answer:

    Here's how I'd go about it: Put the entire video production on YouTube or Vimeo so that people can watch it (albeit at lower quality) for free. This emphasizes that he's is looking to give back to the community, not just to make a quick buck. Then, make sure that the actual DVD package has some sort of value-added. Snappy packaging, maybe a poster or a motorcycle decal or something. Make the physical DVD something that people want to own, want to have sitting on their shelves. This leaves people little reason to bother pirating the DVD, while leaving them plenty of reason to want to buy it. And it has the added bonus that the full-length production being available for free online will almost certainly draw some attention from racing enthusiasts elsewhere in the world. The potential audience might be larger than your friend thinks.

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I'd go the opposite direction from dirtdirt: put a disclaimer on the front thanking the person for supporting the sport and the guy who made the DVD possible by purchasing the disc. With their continued support, they can look foward to seeing another DVD release next year. Then mention the website to direct people there to see more content. This works especially well on people who know that any threats of FBI/Interpol involvement is just bullshit guilt-tripping and assumption of bad faith from the creator. I dislike being accused of being a pirate when I purchase a DVD, especially as the pirated version would have this part excised. /this is all personal preference, but I know in the UK they went from "Piracy = stealing! Don't steal, you filthy thief!"-adverts to ones where a celebrity plainly thanks the cinema audience for supporting their art.

slimepuppy

This is the 21st century. You can't make people pay for data. The problem your friend faces isn't a copy protection problem; it's a usability problem. In a lot of cases, it's simply easier to obtain and watch pirated video than it would be to buy the physical disk. Your friend's task should be to make it so incredibly easy for his customers to give him money for the product that they won't even bother with piracy. Some ideas: - Offer the DVD for sale online, and make sure that your online store is super easy to use (no unnecessary signups, no weird payment schemes). - Make the packaging of the DVD itself something desirable. (People like to collect things, put them on their shelves, share them with friends.) - Consider offering a downloadable version of the video at a lower price, something close to what the regular price of the DVD is plus bandwidth costs, minus the cost of manufacturing the DVD; make it as easy as possible to click a button that says "Download now for $n" and start the download immediately. - Consider offering the video online for free (at a lower resolution, maybe?), in addition to selling the physical DVD; use the free video as a way to use a tool like Kickstarter to raise funds for the next video. - Sell other kinds of merchandise that can't be (as easily) copied, like t-shirts.

aparrish

Put a big scary looking message on each DVD case and physical DVD that says "The program on this DVD has an embedded piracy tracking signal which is registered with Interpol. Unauthorized duplication, broadcast, or re-distribution will be traced to the original purchaser of this copy of this DVD, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Of course, there's no code. This doesn't actually do anything other than possibly make someone think twice about idly ripping the DVD.

dirtdirt

burnmp3s: Yeah, I agree that a moderated forum might toss out any Rapidshare links (And isn't Australia about to block filedump sites? Or am I thinking of the UK?) but my point was that if I wanted to send my friend a largish video, I'd likely do it using the same tools as I would if I wanted to share it with the world; A dumpsite, ftp or torrent. The difference wouldn't be in the technological know-how, but rather my and my friends intent of not spreading it and keeping mum. This is different if we're sneakernetting, but to do a rip is more of a pain than uploading it somewhere, was my point. Agreed, compressing a DVD is too much bother for most people, but you only need one person with access and inclination; So it might be a completist or hamster who happens on the DVD by chance, through a partner or relative or whatever, and who has no connection to the community nor consideration for the creator. Weakest link, so to speak. Just look at even the public torrent sites and consider how the oddest, most obscure stuff is available because someone felt the itch for whatever reason. Some people are motivated by completely other things than are easily imagined. Check out http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/confessions-of-a-book-pirate.html, linked and discussed from http://www.metafilter.com/88638/Confessions-of-a-Book-Pirate for some insight into one motivating force of piracy. From my time on Hotline & KDX before bittorrent took over, I know that many people put enormous effort into digitalizing material, enjoying the debate over the finer points of multimedia taxonomy more than the material itself. None of this is a solution to your friend, but perhaps a clue to where not to spend too much energy and time… Of course, technology is a hinderance for some people; It's not like all information is automatically accesible to everyone even if there is a digital copy online. But if your business model hinges on the technological ignorance of a sufficient number of punters, I would hedge my bets…

monocultured

I think the "this is a small operation and I need to cover my costs" appeal is worth incorporating. I also think that giving people something difficult to pirate as an incentive is also worth trying. This need not be deluxe packaging or something like that—it could be a code for logging in to a website where you'd offer, say, advance rough cuts of the next DVD. Obviously that's not piracy-proof either, but I believe it could be set up in a way that limits people passing it around (or even turns pass-around recipients into customers, if you're good).

adamrice

Thanks to all MeFi's for an excellent discussion. I could mark every answer as best answer, but I think I'll leave them all unmarked, in recognition that there probably isn't one approach that clearly trumps all others. (Has MetaTalk ever resolved what to do is such situations? - don't answer that and derail my thread!) Both my mate and I have read over this discussion a couple of times now, and it's given us lots of food for thought. FWIW the general consensus seems to be in the direction we were heading anyway, but we'll tweak what we were thinking of doing and adopt or adapt some of the ideas presented. Thanks!

puffmoike

I'll vote "skippable(!) appeal at the beginning". I've seen a bunch of those, and usually the reminder that you're ripping off a person instead of shareholders and corporate overlords trumps "information must be freed" considerations.

themel

Sell it in Blu-Ray only format. That's much harder to pirate for the casual pirate due to file sizes. It will also greatly reduce sales given that blu ray sales are still around 15% of dvd sales (in the US at least, not sure about Australia). And I assume production costs would be higher as well.

burnmp3s

Sell it in Blu-Ray only format. That's much harder to pirate for the casual pirate due to file sizes. Keep in mind that nothing will prevent a motivated individual from copying it. Put a low-res copy online.

blue_beetle

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