The most effective way to combat piracy is convenient and cheap legal services.

All new studies confirm the same fact: punitive measures and repression against users and distributors of pirated content is not the best way to combat piracy. The most effective measure is cheap and high-quality legal services that people will enjoy using.

A new study on this topic was conducted by the New Zealand telecommunications company Vocus Group and published the results in the article “Netflix kills content piracy” .

“Legal streaming content providers achieve what Hollywood could not do: they eradicate piracy by broadcasting movies and TV shows that people like at a reasonable price and with maximum convenience,” the final report says.

The survey by request of the Vocus Group was conducted among New Zealand users, but it can be stated with a high degree of confidence that the same laws apply in all countries where convenient and inexpensive legal services are freely available.
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The study showed that piracy is “dying a natural death,” because more and more people prefer to access their content legally: “To summarize, the main reason why people leave piracy is that it just causes more trouble than worth it, ”said Taryn Hamilton, general manager of the Vocus Group New Zealand consumer market.

“The study confirms what many Internet experts instinctively understand: the drivers of piracy are not criminals, but people who cannot easily or easily get the content they want.”

Although many Internet experts "instinctively understand" this, but this fact has not yet become obvious to the right holders. For many years in different countries, they continue to hunt for users who download pirated content: from mass filing of lawsuits to attempts to disable pirates access to the Internet (right holders operate through Internet providers). Right holders are investing millions of dollars in such a fight against piracy. But all these punitive measures have proven to be ineffective: they have virtually no effect on the level of piracy. But legal and accessible services like Netflix, on the contrary, are strongly influenced.

A survey of more than a thousand New Zealanders from a representative sample confirmed that when content is provided at a fair price, people choose it instead of piracy. The survey also showed that the de facto level of piracy has declined recently: “About half of all respondents watched pirated content at some point in their lives, but most rarely or never do this at the moment,” says Hamilton. According to him, at the moment the level of piracy in New Zealand is estimated at about 10%.

Of course, in other countries this indicator is much higher, but the principal conclusions from this do not change. In the case of a convenient paid alternative, people prefer to pay a little, rather than face the inconvenience of unlicensed content. This is indicated by a survey of those who still occasionally view pirated content. They were directly asked in which case they could give up this habit - and with a huge margin from other options, “cheaper streaming services” (57%) and “more diverse content in existing streaming services” (48%) won. Punitive measures, such as prosecution of pirates and censorship of pirate sites, were considered effective only by 33% and 22%, respectively. The amount is more than 100%, because it was possible to choose several answers.

In New Zealand, remarkable statistics on how to watch live sports broadcasts. Even there, paid streaming (29%) have already surpassed free TV in popularity (22%).

The researchers point out that the level of piracy has dropped significantly due to free and paid streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix. Most people find it much easier to watch videos through them than to solve the technical difficulties of downloading unlicensed content.

But bans and blocking resources cannot solve the problem: “For those who understand something on the Internet, it is clear that censorship does not work here. People know that there are several sites where you can download illegal materials. They also know that blocking the most popular ones simply means that you will get pirated material elsewhere, ”says Hamilton.