You might have noticed numerous websites “going dark” a few weeks ago to protest the anti-piracy bills, Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). I seriously doubt that Google or Wikipedia have any desire to promote IP theft, but they did have valid issues about the way those bills implemented that IP protection and the unknown technical, economical, and socio-political ramifications. And when push comes to shove, people care more about uninterrupted Facebook access than they do about protecting a studio’s content, plus as we saw with the music industry, the people trying to protect their IP often come across as villains. We as an industry need to create a reason for people to care about stopping piracy. Gamification can provide that incentive.
Gamification is when you apply game mechanics (levels, rewards, progress indicators, leaderboards, and more) to leverage people’s inherent competitiveness and desires to make dull tasks fun. Foursquare, for example, provides points when you check into a location. Businesses are successfully leveraging this so that frequent customers can earn coupons or other rewards. Foursquare Brands is also being used successfully to boost brand value, such as MTV’s “GTL badge” Jersey Shore tie-in. SuperBetter is using gamification to help people recover from illness or injury, and a recent article in Popular Science discussed how one person was using gamification to improve his romantic life with his fiancé. The short of it is that gamification can make people care and work harder for something they might otherwise not care about.
We can use gamification to stop piracy. First, let’s create a fun story. A band of rabid pirates with eye-patches and bird-flu-infected parrots are kidnapping our favorite characters and stars. Level one starts with Captain Kirk being held hostage, and you need to help save him! To save him, you download a special browser extension, and whenever you’re on a page with pirated content, you press a button and tell the heroic navy, with their gleaming white smiles, where the pirates are. When the navy confirms the pirates and stops their latest raid, everyone who helped the navy gets points. When you get enough points, you complete the level and get a reward. The rewards range from access to a legal download of content to a free movie ticket, which would encourage you and your friends to get into the theater again, and their paid tickets would help box office returns. Consumers care about protecting IP, and everyone but the pirates win.
Of course there would be special rewards, too. If you’re at a theater and see someone recording the movie, report them to an employee. Then, the manager rewards you a special power-up, perhaps giving you triple points or helping you automatically finish your next mission. By directly stopping a pirate, you become a hero in the game.
The essential point here is that we give consumers an incentive to help stop piracy. There will certainly be technical details to figure out when implementing this system (e.g. providing easy ways to report links to pirated content as well as pages directly containing it), deals to negotiate to make this work (making sure the rewards are worth it to users), and human oversight (staff to verify the flagged content on less-reported links). Yet with the increasing global losses due to piracy, these seem like small challenges and pocket change in the overall picture. Even if we can’t implement this on a large scale, YouTube and such could implement a smaller scale on their own–report pirated content, get a few ad-free views. Abuse the system, and you see more ads.
Lastly, we as an industry should also think about why people pirate content and how to prevent it. iTunes helped reduce piracy because it provided legal access to high-quality music at a price where consumers found it easier to pay than to find pirated copies. I don’t subscribe to cable yet have heard great things about HBO’s Game of Thrones. There is no way for me to pay to buy just that content–if I want to see it, I have to pirate it. BBC’s Sherlock was trending on Twitter in Australia when it premiered in the UK, even though it legally wasn’t available in Australia. People want content, and in many cases, it’s currently easier to pirate content than it is to pay for it! It should be a telling thing that SOPA/PIPA caused more of an outrage than the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law on 12/31/11, which allows for indefinite detention without charge or trial of US citizens! If we can work to update our distribution contracts for the digital, 21st-century world, then perhaps piracy will fade away. That should be our end-goal. In the mean time, gamification can help make it harder for the pirates to steal content.
Subscribe to the Feed