In Paul Tassi’s article “You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You”, the author believes the war on piracy cannot be won. Tassi explains that “As technology continues to evolve, the battle between pirates and copyright holders is going to escalate, and pirates are always, always going to be one step ahead”. He believes laws are not the solution, as we saw with SOPA & PIPA. Tassi see’s piracy as a service problem, and the only solution is for Hollywood to lower its prices and make movie steaming easier than what it is now. Tassi explains “The primary problem movie studios have to realize is that everything they charge for is massively overpriced…They have failed to realize that people want things to be easy”.
Similarly, in the article “The Pirate Bay shutdown: the whole story (so far)”, Timothy J. Seppala explains how the piracy website came crashing down. Pirate Bay allowed for the download of movies, shows, and even music using “torrents” instead of the actual copyrighted content. In 2014, police raided and shut down the website for good. Utorrent had replaced the piracy site, but Seppala explains “Sure, you’re going to have a minority of folks who’ll pirate anything and everything as their own means of anarchy, but for the most part, by offering an all-around better legal experience (not having to worry about downloading a virus; better video quality) most people aren’t going to bother pirating in the first place”.
Finally, the Quartz article “Everything we know about how people watched “The Interview” and what it means for the future of internet video”, by Zachary M. Seward, showed how the film changed the game for online streaming. The film was streamed, legally, at home over two million times between Christmas Eve & Dec. 27, and generated more than $15 million in revenue. This was a prime example of how people simply want an easy way to stream from home, and that while piracy can’t be stopped, this is one way to drastically cut down the number of illegal downloads.