In an interesting op-ed on ContentSutra, the CEO and founder of games2win.com Alok Kejriwal offers a rare take on the pros of internet piracy. Rare because this is a voice seldom heard in India, and it’s great to find an Indian being innovative in matters of copyright, piracy and media convergence. It also promises to make the debate surrounding online content and related copyright issues more exciting.- piracy creates economies of scale (costs of distribution come down as the number of users/sharers increase, and can help in competitive pricing);
- it creates democracy (anyone/anything can go viral in the online world – you don’t need to be “somebody” to cut a disc, and so on); and
- it creates innovation (he sees the online gaming industry as something that evolved to fill the gap created by enforcement-hungry big game console companies).
This op-ed is clearly limited to the content creation industry, and the arguments cannot blindly be extrapolated elsewhere. And Kejriwal’s business model is still a little fuzzy to me (he speaks of embedding ‘inviziads’, or invisible ads in games that go with their games whenever pirates take them, but leave the content unchanged. Which is what brings in the revenue). Also, the Indian online gaming industry has faced some testing times in the recent past, with the Aggarwala brothers and the-game-formerly-known-as-scrabulous bearing the brunt of things, albeit on a completely different plane of argument. At the same time, there is something to be said for the potential latent in emerging sectors in emerging markets, content being a poster-child for the whole debate.
The economics of content creation and content sharing is definitely a fascinating subject, and may not have been explored enough in the context of an ever-expanding Indian market. The implications on the fundamental principles of copyright are clearly significant, whether in context of who is liable or when exactly can a copyright be said to have been infringed. We still await to see a domestic legislature thinking afresh in dealing with such matters. Will a entrepreneurial-end lobby add some spice to the game? Open for your thoughts.
(*Apologies for the long silence at my end recently – I have been grappling with technology and other issues for some time, which had brought blogging to a near stand-still. This trend should reverse in the days to come).
