How can content producers benefit from pirates?

Alok Kejriwal (Alok Kejriwal) is an entrepreneur from Mumbai, CEO and co-founder of games2win.com.

Whenever I listen to an iPod, I remember Napster. The music industry has dealt with it, as with the Taliban pirates - condemned, overcame and closed. But didn't Napster do the same thing iTunes did later?
How would things develop if the labels Virgin, EMI and others got together, invested in Napster, or just bought it with giblets and made a “digital music” distribution channel out of it? Any Sony “walkpod” would bring it to its logical conclusion: Musical bigwigs make music, iron producers make a device for listening to it.

The moral is simple: before you fight piracy, you had to understand it. Here, for example, I manage a company for the production of computer games, we make 15 games a month, we have more than 350 items in our catalog. Now I know 8900 sites that have stolen or, as they say, "borrowed a piece" from our products.
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To be honest, after the initial shock, I began to rejoice at the situation. It proves that our products are in demand, because they wouldn’t steal unnecessary things. But more importantly, we have learned how to handle piracy in our favor.

Recently I asked a 13-year-old girl if she could go to a music store, take a disk from a shelf and carry her home without paying? The answer was clear: no. But the same girl easily sent mp3 files to her friends over the network. When I explained to her that she was “stealing” in this way, she simply did not understand it.

Piracy is a new form of consumption. And it will continue. Whether you like it or not, do you think this is piracy, or not, music and all forms of entertainment will walk around the world without restrictions. The task of the industry is to learn how to make money on it, and not to build obstacles. I will list what is good in piracy, where to look for the benefit:

• Piracy contributes to increasing the efficiency of production volumes. Distribution through agents and delivery networks are history. Consumers themselves distribute products, deliver themselves, which causes real tsunamis of consumption and distribution. So your expenses are reduced, you do not pay for it. Content creators can move to more aggressive pricing under these conditions.
• Piracy breeds democracy. The stars are no longer due to meeting with the big wheel or hitting the producer’s eyes. Digital distribution has become a “common denominator” for all creative people, their chance for glory. Pirates are the best advertising agents. And they work for you for free. Stars need to partner with them, not fight.
• Piracy promotes innovation. Companies producing games for consoles, have not achieved success in China, thanks to the flourishing there piracy. Their discs were copied and sold on the black market. They felt cheated and left. This created a huge vacuum in the market, which was immediately filled by the manufacturers of online games, who are absolutely not afraid of disk piracy. This was the impetus for the development of Farmville and Mafia Wars.

How to win?
It's unpleasant when someone steals something from you. But if you abstract from emotions, you can see positive opportunities.

• Live performances of artists now bring more money than from selling discs. Pirate marketing is a new measure of the artist's value. Pirates tell people about new groups, you do not spend a penny on advertising. Pirates help start new stars.
• Should big music companies create competitors to iPods and iTunes?
• Let everyone win in the ecosystem. Our secret weapon for gaining value from pirates is “inviziads” [ from invisible (invisible) and ads (short for “advertising”). - approx. translator ]. We put ads in our games, and the pirates took them away. So when the games appeared on pirate sites, our advertisement also appeared there. Please note that the content is preserved in its original form. The consumer won (got the content for free), the pirates won (gained popularity for interesting content), and we won (thanks to advertising in the content).

The next battle will begin when eBook readers like Kindle will be widely distributed. Books (old and new) will be distributed to friends and families. Authors, publishers will fall under this tsunami, in this round they will not be paid. Let's see how many of them will try to fight the wave and drown, and how much will relax, will not swim against the tide, survive and win along with innovation .