Piracy – Are we going for the kill, finally?

Piracy – Are we going for the kill, finally?
Posted by Adgully Bureau | October 5th, 2009 at 11:57 pm

Piracy

From Khans to Bachchans – they are stalwart figures of Indian cinema who are constantly in the news. Not always for the right reasons at that! All of them, at some point of time, however, have featured as supporting anti-piracy slogans and acts. Did the piracy business slow down? Partly, yes, but mostly, no. Piracy is still promoted by download mad-chaps like you and me.

Come on, accept it – you do (or used to, for sure) download free everything. Free e-books, free music, free television shows and movies, free games. Think of any content you can and, if we can be brutally honest, you’ll encounter hundreds of torrents doing business on the internet.

But along came a revolution of sorts when Moserbaer bought rights to market certain Indian movies. This caught up with the public fast as we are not just getting the movies we like but are also being offered an association between two reputed institutions – film makers and Moserbaer. Now, something of a similar nature is happening towards music. Companies are going ultra digital and releasing music on pen drives and SD cards.

T-Series and ADAG’s BIG Music and Home Entertainment have released soundtracks of movies – Blue and Do Knot Disturb respectively – in similar formats. Kulmeet Makkar, chief executive officer (CEO) of BIG Music and Home Entertainment, said while addressing the media, “The SD card is suited for the mobile consumer, while the pen drive would, perhaps, find favour with the urban, laptop-wielding consumer.”

Sandisk – a US based hardware maker – had done such a thing with Universal Music Group, SonyBMG Music Entertainment and TimeWarner Music. The flash drives had music pre-loaded into them and the cost of each was in tune of abouot INR 750. Not bad, considering we’re getting a flash drive that could carry important data in emergency situations. Not to forget, there might be additional movie-related products in that flash drive like clippings, downloads etc!

Not much was heard about Hotspot’s initiative of giving its customers a movie card that would empower cell phone users to watch Bollywood’s latest flicks on a 320×240 pixel screen resolution. The 1 GB SD card is conveniently priced at INR 350 and contains full-length movie along with ringtones, wallpapers and other trivia!

Kulmeet Makkar further added “More people are consuming music on digital networks; they are connected and on the move. Cassette and CD sales are slowing between 5% and 15% year-on-year depending on the territory and the genre.”

Does this indicate a dead end for the piracy industry that is nearly INR 1300 crore, and growing? We would like to hope so. But realistically speaking; sorry blokes, piracy will continue to exist. For every baddie, there is a hero in our movies and the latter emerges winner always. We hope in this scenario too, the baddie (piracy) is defeated.

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