Peter Griffin: Playing fair is a way to stamp out piracy

We all love music and movies. There's this thing in our collective psyche that keeps us coming back for more. It's the desire to be entertained.

What's been quite entertaining of late is watching the music and film industries go to increasingly desperate lengths to ensure the ongoing success of the industry they control.

In last Saturday's Weekend Herald it was reported that copyright enforcement body, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (NZFACT), will employ new spy software to try and catch people downloading movies illegally from web-based peer-to-peer file sharing communities.

The Motion Picture Association of America and its music equivalent the Recording Industry Association, have for years been using software to track file sharers and some have been prosecuted, but that hasn't significantly dented the level of illegal downloading.

It appears the MPAA has come up with something new, codenamed Pirate Hunter. In a fit of self-righteous zeal NZFACT, the MPAA's New Zealand affiliate, publicly revealed the existence of the new software in the hope of scaring the public into steering clear of peer-to-peer file sharing systems. It seems the MPAA went ballistic at the premature leak of the tracking software, not that NZFACT gave too much away. Its description of the system was vague and it refused to let the Herald have a look at the software, leaving the central questions about how Pirate Hunter works unanswered.

I don't think the future viability of the entertainment industry lies in pursuing ever more aggressive methods of nabbing illegal downloaders.

But does the future lie in SpiralFrog.com? It's a new download service which has the support of music heavyweight Universal. It plans to give away music if users agree to watch "non-intrusive, contextually-relevant, targeted advertising".

This also sounds like a recipe for commercial disaster. All it takes is someone to crack the digital rights management software bundled with downloaded songs and suddenly Frog's music is being sent all over the internet for people to download freely.

But even if the security of the music holds up, can this type of business model possibly work? I'm sceptical, but witness the success of Google, which derives most of its revenue from adverts that are displayed alongside search engine results. The deal works well for web users because Google's advertising isn't too intrusive. I barely notice the adverts displayed down the right side of the screen when using Google.

But Google's search engine and the webmail service Gmail are a lot more pervasive in our lives than SpiralFrog is likely to be.

I'm less likely to be seduced by advertisers on SpiralFrog because I'll be going there specifically to download free music, my mind telling me that sitting through the adverts is something I have to do to get the freebies. Google is a lot more subtle and, dare I say, insidious.

People are willing to pay to download music as long as it's reasonably priced and is stripped of the horrible digital rights management software that prevents them from playing it back how and when they like. The answer to piracy is fairly simple - offer a fair deal and music and movie lovers will, by and large, play fair.