Piracy is a very emotive subject, especially for creators of pirated content, and I have been involved in three industries now which have dealth with piracy in different ways: Music, Video Games and as a Youtube producer.
I feel because it is such an emotive subject, there is a lot of assumptions made and they can be incorrect, for example, every instance of piracy is a lost sale is a common attitude among publishers and studios in the video game industry, yet it is demonstratably false, and some studios report an increase in sales after a pirated version is released.
So this is my 2p, and the reason I created an account to stop lurking here: Piracy is a service problem.
Piracy was rampant in the music industry, it was and still is easy, the file sizes are small and nearly any album can be found and downloaded in 5 minutes flat. At first, the industry cracked down hard on the file sharers and site owners, however the legal system cannot keep pace with the internet and the vast majority of cases were dropped because digital evidence is notoriously expensive to collect, easy to manipulate and rarely is more than circumstantial. Besides which, for every site that gets taken down after a year of work, twenty more spring up, with more sophisticated defences against detection. Why then is the music industry, particularly the indie scene in rude health? Well, simply because it is easier to get digital music legally than it is illegally. People are definately willing to pay for music, and most people with the disposable income will pay for it if they can.
Now, lets look at the most pirated tv show of 2015 - Game of Thrones. Lets look at how convienient it is to obtain legally in the UK. You can of course buy a DVD set of season 5, watch it "live" on sky or buy a Now TV pass. The most expensive option by far is Sky, costing a minimum of £400, though admittedly, this gets you 2 seasons - 24 month bundle and you get to record it, watch on your tv etc. A DVD is the cheapest option, at £20 for the season, though you have to wait until you can buy it. The middle option is to buy a now TV pass each month that an episode is broadcast, costing £21, if you're smart and you get to watch it live. The problem is, people are already paying for a Netflix subscription, Amazon Prime, Spotify, have a library of steam games, have a library of DVD's, and quite often, they just want to be in the loop. They don't care about game of thrones as much as talking about game of thrones with their friends, so the £20 is not something they're willing to pay. So they don't because it's just not worth the money + hastle of waiting or figuring out Now TV. These are not people who will pay for GoT anyway. If you implimented a perfect piracy prevention system, they would not pay.
So the question is, if you can, as kaylee wishes, implement a perfect piracy protection system - which you never can - if it displays on a monitor, you can simply set up a dummy software monitor which "displays it" into a memory buffer and records it from there - but if you could and the budget made sense, they why wouldn't you? It's a service problem again. Yes, you may prevent piracy, but at what cost to your legitimate customers, the ones who gave you the full asking cost to watch your content. You make your product much worse for them, and that has proven time and time again to cost you customers. Gametrailers shut down this week, why, because of their insistance on using proprietry video player. The audience doesn't want to deal with "not as good as youtube", and so they just don't. They go elsewhere, even at the expense of missing out on that content. Kaylee, you could introduce some system with timed tokens and whatever, but all you would do is annoy people who gave you their money as halfway through watching your video, you get an error and they have to reload to start watching again, yet I promise you, the pirates who paid nothing, who stripped that system out of your video would be getting a better deal. You know what companies I will no longer buy from? Companies like EA, who's paying customers get a substandard product as a direct result of anti-piracy measures, when the pirates get the product the creaters intended.
I think you just have to accept the basic premise that piracy happens, it's a cost of doing business over the internet - the business 99% of small content creators wouldn't have if it weren't for the internet. It's worth considering that not every pirate is a lost sale, if the content isn't worth it to them, if they cannot afford your content, then they never were going to give you the money. That they get the content anyway is maybe worth making peace with, and focus your efforts on making better content that appeals to more people, so that the balance shifts, that it becomes worth the asking price for more people, and the evidence suggests that if you do that, more people will pay for your content.
Finally, it really is worth looking hard at the demographic of pirates. The research by Excipio shows that piracy is most common among the poorest, and youngest in their surveys - correlation is not causality, but can you so easily dismiss the idea that the $3 the Sundance Infographic tosses out as "only" when $2 is more than a days pay for half the worlds population - would you pay a day and a thirds pay for a movie? I wouldn't, because for me, that would, on a bad day be the equivilent of dropping £150. And yes, if you put the cost of access to your movie at £150, yes, I would pirate it.
