Mar 09
25
The Cultural Impact of P2P
Yesterday, I presented a lecture to a first year class of media students. The topic was “The Future Of Content Distribution”.
I asked for a show of hands at the beginning to find out what proportion of the room (about 250 students) had downloaded music for free at sometime. About 85% of the room raised their hands.
Just prior to the lecture beginning there was an announcement on the do’s and dont's of copyright in the use of images in course work with the need for attribution being paramount.
Toward the end of the lecture I was talking about movie and TV program downloads.
Show of hands again – only one person had downloaded a TV program.
Almost all had downloaded movies.
I explained that all downloading was probably illegal, regardless of arguments about the morality of the action.
A further show of hands to establish how many would no longer download material – one hand went up.
This is the culture shift that has taken place. It is irreversible.
The only way that the content and media industries can work with this is to get on the “right” side of the tide. You can't surf against the wave, only with the force of the wave. P2P is an unstoppable wave.
More interesting is to get a sense of how the students think about the elements that make up demand for content, and how they understand the changes in the ecosystem. So at the end of the presentation I spent quite a lot of time with the class asking them what questions they wanted to raise about the topic.
One of the most insightful questions was asked by a student who clearly knew his way around torrents.
He asked what I thought the cultural impact might be from the fact that the way that P2P works the more popular a piece of content, the more efficient the network functions to deliver the part files. With art house movies, there is limited exposure in the cinema, limited demand from consumers, and therefore the distribution of the movie is very slow – sufficiently slow as to make it too frustrating for the downloader to continue an engagement to download. So again to the question: “What is the cultural impact over time of access to blockbuster entertainment (i.e. from Hollywood) and non-access to rarer kinds of movies (i.e. foreign films, small budget local movies etc).
I think this is a very interesting question and one that needs to be examined over time to get a read on its impact.
My sense is that this also has economic consequences that need to be examined.
The content industry has been promoting the meme that piracy is killing their business and that it should be stamped out.
Our belief, based on revisiting all the available data, is that P2P acts as a promoter of the brands that are most active in the P2P networks, regardless of the revenue leakage that takes place. This equates to more word of mouth which leads to more ticket sales, more DVD sales of the blockbuster. In other words P2P may quite possibly disadvantage small budget movies by making them rarer.
On the other hand maybe the scarcity increases their value.
In terms of cultural impact, we have undertaken a fair bit of research into the Chinese marketplace. Because of the clear language differences, the scarcity of volume production of Chinese movies, the small number of theatres, and the relatively high price of tickets, it is not surprising that a huge amount of western movie P2P download activity takes place in China. What is interesting is what the cultural impact of western movies will be on the Chinese population.
This will only be seen over time, perhaps over a generation or more.