25%+ Aussie Pirates: Reasons Why

The Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation tells us more than a quarter of Australians are pirates.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/426521/more_than_25_australia_ip_pirates_ipaf_says/

When video content was available on CD or DVD, there was still piracy, but it was never as widespread, nor were its proponents as vociferous as they are now. In the DVD age, piracy was more the trade of organised crime. Dedicated DIY factories would pump out pirated DVDs to sell en masse as a money making exercise for unscrupulous sorts. It wasn't the pimple-faced teenager returning after school to find his Game of Thrones had downloaded. Nor was it the Mum delighted another episode of Pregnant in Heels was up on Zshare.

The reason piracy, as it's known today, wasn't like that in the DVD age was because DVDs and CDs, on the whole, worked. When you bought a DVD of a new movie, you could play it on any DVD player or computer in your house. You could take it to your friend's home and play it on their system. You could lend it to a cousin and they'd have no trouble pressing play. All you needed was a DVD player and a TV (the cables came with, for free). If the movie or TV show came out earlier in a different country, you could go online or call overseas and order it. The disc would arrive in the mail, and if you had a region free player, or had bought an overseas model, you were sorted. There were no barriers, other than whether the video content had been released yet.

Now, it's madness. In short, it's this:

The Oatmeal's 'I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened.'

TV shows or movies are available overseas, tantalisingly a click away, but not in your country. Series are seasons behind in their digital versions, and DVD releases are becoming more chaotic as they get tied in with digital rights negotiations.

If you don't live in the U.S., it's exponentially worse. If you want to buy a digital version of a TV show, and then watch it on your TV, you have soooooo much more to do and pay for than you used to. iTunes? Thinking of using a cable to connect your iPad or iPhone to the TV? Nope - officially unauthorised. You'll need AU$100+ for AppleTV, plus the approximately 50% mark up in Australia's iTunes store for the actual content. Then there are huge delays in release dates. A popular show like Parks and Recreation, for example, is only up to season 2 on Australian iTunes, but season 4 in the US. Amazon Instant Video looks closest to working, but you need specific hardware (admittedly a far larger range than Apple), and the USA-to-Australia situation isn't entirely clear. There is no Australian Amazon or amazon.com.au, leaving compatibility questionable enough to avoid clicking 'Buy Now' for a little while yet.

More than 25% of Australians are pirates, and loudly arguing about piracy online and in the media, because actually accessing content we want to consume and are happy to pay for is becoming both ridiculous and in some cases, impossible. We used to buy a video and watch it wherever we wanted. Now, the only way to do this is to pirate. You get a video file you can play on any device, without confusing and sometimes conflicting DRM problems, and you can get it as soon as it airs from around the world. The increasingly complex, walled-garden approach of digital content distributors like Amazon and Apple are strangling the market and pushing record numbers of everyday, otherwise law-abiding citizens into piracy. The big industry players are using broken models that force their customers into positions the customers hate. Until the giant companies start simplifying and making content more accessible, they'll continue to face a growing sea of angry pirates.