Social Media

What Does Social Media Mean for Piracy?



The debate over piracy, however, has taken a new turn due to a prominent trend: the rise of social media. Social media has added even greater efficiencies to content sharing, but will this increase piracy, or curtail it by offering more accessible alternatives?

How social media can enable piracy

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One of social media's characteristics is shareability, specifically how easy it is to share links and content via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social media conduits. With the ability to easily share and embed information, the ability to share copyrighted work has risen as well.

Here are some prominent examples of social media enabling piracy:

YouTube: Anyone can upload a video to YouTube, even TV shows, which was the fuel of the YouTube-Viacom $1 billion lawsuit. Today, Google and YouTube try to find the right balance between user content and copyrighted content. In some cases, YouTube has even muted the audio of videos with copyrighted music.

MySpace: In 2006, Universal Music sued MySpace, claiming it was a copyright infringer due to its video uploads feature. This followed similar lawsuits issued by Universal Music against video sharing sites Bolt and Grouper.

Facebook: Facebook recently became a center of the piracy debate when torrent sharing came to Facebook. Torrents are a preferred way to share peer-to-peer content illegally.

Facebook has since blocked torrents from The Pirate Bay (a prominent torrent-sharing website), and it seems that sharing torrents in a way that is tied to your actual identity might not be wise. Hence, Facebook is unlikely to become a platform for continued infringement.

How social media can combat piracy

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Social media has indeed helped spread piracy in some respects, but it's also arguable that social media may hold the key to quelling the piracy trend. By streaming content to users from the source, some companies have found ways to monetize despite piracy.

Here are some social media companies that are enabling efficient sharing of legal content: and Pandora: and Pandora are music recommendation services that incorporate your tastes and habits and calculate which songs you will enjoy. Both give the user a sophisticated library of streaming music that doesn't require stealing or piracy, although some companies are still not happy, and Pandora in particular has struggled due to the high fees charged by record labels for music streaming.

Hulu: Hulu, the streaming video website co-owned by Fox and NBC, has been able to draw around 25 million visitors a month to watch full-length TV shows and movies on their website, rather than through illegal means. The convenience and shareability of Hulu may be an answer to video piracy.

Apple: Although Apple is not strictly a social media company, its success in monetizing music via the iTunes store and iPhones has shown that users are willing to pay for content that can be pirated when purchasing and sharing are made easy. Recently, Apple dropped DRM protection on music downloads, but raised prices as a compromise to major multimedia companies.

These are only a few examples of companies finding ways to monetize and spread music, movies, and other content via social media without resorting to piracy.

Social media's effect on the piracy debate

The debate over piracy is heating up once again. In addition to torrents being shared on Facebook, France struck down a law that would have taken away people's ability to connect to the Internet after three strikes of copyright infringement.

Clearly, piracy is still a problem, but is social media a solution to the problem, or is it an enabler of piracy?

The final answer is probably a combination of both. New technology can be utilized in many ways, depending on who is using it. Those intent on pirating content will find ways to use social media to their ends, but that's no reason to see it as a threat to media companies: as Hulu shows, it's also a huge opportunity.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Brasil2

Reviews: Facebook, Google, Hulu,, MySpace, Pandora, Twitter, YouTube

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