Content Producers & Distributors: Stop Encouraging Piracy

Media producers and distributors don’t you think it is time you guys joined the rest of the world in the 21st Century and stopped with these silly rules based on geolocation? Honestly, you are just encouraging the very piracy you sit around complaining about. Case in point the image above. My friends and I were talking about re-watching this series from 2004-05 which unfortunately got cancelled after one season. My friend looked for the DVDs and they don’t exist. He looked for it on iTunes, and it is not available to be sold in Canada. What do you think people’s next step is going to be? We look online and see if we can find it pirated. Lo and behold it is readily available online!

Another case in point my friend asked me to recommend some new music. I told him about this awesome new artist I had heard about out of the UK. My friend went to iTunes to look for the artist’s music and download it only to find they only had one or two songs available for download in Canada. Can you guess what the next steps were? (Hint: Exactly the same as above.)

Both of the cases above were people willing and ready to pay for the content but they weren’t allowed to because of a boundary drawn on a map. The first example specifically that content is available FOR FREE on one side of a line and utterly unavailable for any price on the other side of it. Calling it ridiculous doesn’t begin to do this justice.

If content distributors aren’t distributing the content where they have the license to do so then their licenses should be revoked and be given to someone who will or just be distributed by the creators themselves. It is that simple. This is the second decade of the 21st Century and it is time the people who are in charge of getting content out there realized what this means. If you don’t, then I don’t see how you can then turn around and complain that people are pirating your content when you seem to be doing everything you can to encourage them to do so.