The scourge of piracy on digital content - the problem and Now there is a solution

In this article I will discuss the widespread problem of piracy on intellectual property in digital content format which mainly includes music and electronic/soft copy books. The starting point for my discussion is to alert and draw attention to the fact that any producer of digital content (musician or book author) would have expended their energies and deployed their Almighty God given talent and time to produce the content and naturally therefore  expectant of due rewards. Once the digital content is produced it has to be availed to the consumers in the global village through various channels like software downloads. The problem arises in that consumers buy one digital copy and from then on there is no constraint in them creating duplicates for friends and associates – that is the beginning point of revenue leakage. The leakage of revenue far outweighs the one gathered by legitimate sales. Below I discuss the problem statement and some features of a solution that myself and a team of IT technocrats have developed. The actual details of our solution design and how it achieves the prevention of piracy will not be fully disclosed as that is patented technology. We, at this point, encourage all digital content producers (musicians and authors) to get in contact with us (William: +27 799006061) to  find out more how they can benefit from this solution to protect their content against this ruthless monster of piracy.  

Problem statement & effects
Despite music being a widely consumed commodity (naturally every person relates with one or more genres of music), it has not contributed significantly to any Government's treasury due to its widespread piracy.  

The following are common factors:

 - Government is deprived of a legitimate opportunity to realize tax revenue from music sales as the artistes are robbed of earnings from their music through piracy. The sales from pirated music are not taxable as they are in the black market domain. This also includes pirated soft copy textbooks.

 - There are numerous electronic gadgets that can easily copy/reproduce one legitimate copy and circulate it, thereby depriving the artists and Government of due revenue.

 - Talented artists fail to earn a living, leading to unemployment as they fail to realise bread winning status thereby leading to the vicious circle of crime and unemployment.

 - Monitoring for piracy is rendered ineffective by circulation of electronic copies over electronic communication channels like email  while the monitoring mechanisms appear to be limited to patchy and sporadic physical policing methods

Solution benefits
 - Prevention of piracy hence increased revenue to stakeholders

 - Widened and quickened distribution of music

 - Integration with social media platforms e.g Facebook to market music  and generate  accurate statistical records e.g most purchased song which can be intelligently used to maximize revenue

Features of the solution
 - Registration process for a music buyer (online or over the counter)

 - Ordering process where the user buys the music (online or over the counter)

 - Using our patented design to create a non piratable copy (details of this process are patented)

 - Retention of a purchase trail for accounting purposes (revenue accounting and in cases of replacements)

 - Involvement of a bank to facilitate buying and access of funds from other banks including currency conversions

 - Revenue collection, accounting and settlement to the various stakeholders e.g artists, Government  

 - Delivery of the digital content to the buyer.

Conclusion
We firmly believe we have found an attainable solution to curb digital content piracy, this solution will completely transform the music and textbook publishing industry while immensely benefiting the content producers as well as Governments as there will be tight revenue leakage prevention. The current methods of policing against piracy which are restricted to the use of police details patrolling in street corners to scare away individuals vending pirated CDs is massively unhelpful in this digital age as pirated content is largely transmitted in electronic formats – our well researched solution confronts this problem at its strength, we have designed the solution to have aggressive countermeasure safeguards against the piracy channels.