Inappropriate pricing has been described the root of piracy
globally of media products like Compact Disc, Digital Video Display (DVD) among
others, according to the report made public recently by a United States’ led
Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
Just as adequate pricing is said to be the best solution for
the rise in piracy, especially developing economies like in Africa.
The editor of the report tagged ‘Media Piracy in Emerging
Economies,’ Mr. Joe Karaganis, noted that price comparisons between pirated and
licit goods in different countries offer a simple but powerful insights on the
organization of national media markets.
To illustrate these differences, he said, they had compared
the most common legal prices of a range of media goods to the most common
pirate prices and then translated those numbers into a “comparative purchasing
power” (CPP) price that reflected how expensive the item would be for
Americans, for instance, if priced at an equivalent percentage of US per capita
Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The report also found that prices of goods vary according to
a range of factors, including the location of sale, perceptions of demand,
and—in the pirate market—differences in quality, packaging, and degree of
bundling of goods on a single disc.
“Currency fluctuations also have a large impact on price
comparisons. To facilitate comparison, we focused on single-title, high-quality
Compact Disc (CD) and Digital Video Display (DVD) equivalents of licit goods,”
the report observed.
The report conducted in partnership with several
organizations including the Overmundo Institute of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;
Center for Technology and Society of Getulio Vargas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil ; Sarai, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies of India; The
Alternative Law Forum also of India; South African based Association for
Progressive Communications, the Russian Moscow Institute of Physics and
Technology; the Program on Information Justice
and Intellectual Property as well as the Washington College of Law,
American University, Washington, DC, USA.
As said by him, the project was funded by the duo of the
International Development Research Centre based in Ottawa, Canada and The Ford
Foundation of United States.
Further, the report decried that fact that piracy has been
on the rise and with broadband internet this may astronomically increase
globally, especially with some cable landing on the continent in the coming
months.
They cited an instance with South Africa, which as at summer
of 2009 was linked to the wider global Internet by a single undersea cable,
with a very modest total capacity of .8 gigabytes per second. Broadband
services, they said, have been correspondingly expensive and low speed and with
more cables coming into and across the continent with potential to reduce the
cost, this may spur piracy.
“The vast majority of consumer services come with bandwidth
caps in the vicinity of 3 gigabytes per month—a level easily surpassed by streaming
a single high-definition movie,” they noted, adding that the quality of South
African broadband services also ranks near the bottom of international surveys
as at two years ago, just as most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were unable
to guarantee consistent performance for even common video services, such as
YouTube.
In this context, the report pointed out that the uptake of
bandwidth-intensive Peer-to-Peer (P2P) services in South Africa has been very
limited.
The report said, the bandwidth shortage, however, is
expected to ease as new undersea cables come into service.
Total bandwidth in and out of South Africa should improve to
2.58 gigabytes per second in 2010 and according to plans SA is expecting 10.5
terabytes per second by the year 2013 quoting World Wide Worx of 2009 to
buttress their point.
“Internet stakeholders on all sides expect that this
increase will bring cheaper, better broadband services. As computers, storage,
and playback technologies also become more widely available, South African
participation in both the licit and the illicit global digital media economies
is likely to expand dramatically,” the report submitted.
Remmy Nweke
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