There is no doubt that as time goes on that it is necessary for companies to adapt to the market in order to remain relevant. If they decide not to then there is a pretty good chance that the company in question is going to end up like Kodak did when they thought there was no need to upgrade to digital. Since the rise of technology there has been an absolutely massive amount of adaptation going on in the corporate world. One of the biggest examples of adaptation would be the retail industry’s shift to e-commerce in order to meet the demands of the consumer whom would rather shop from home.

Just about every retailer has their own online shopping platform where consumers are able to completely bypass going to physical stores. Heck, companies such as Amazon completely and totally operate via e-commerce and they are doing exceptionally well by doing so. Just imagine how terrible Wal-Mart’s stock would be doing now if they didn’t support online shopping. The point is that retail companies needed to innovate in order to compete and remain relevant.

By now you’re probably wondering why I have been going on about all of this e-commerce stuff when the blog post is actually about piracy. I just really need to drive home the fact that competition promotes adaptation. Now whether you believe piracy is ethical or not there is one industry that absolutely despises it, the media industry. When looked at from a media companies perspective, they have good reason to dislike piracy. Why should these companies sink insane amounts of money into production costs when people are just going to pirate it for free anyways?

I would like to however look at the issue from another perspective and analyze why piracy happens in the first place. Let’s take television shows for example, in order for viewers to watch their favorite shows they often times need to have a cable subscription (which often includes other unwanted channels) in order to gain access to the certain channel that their show resides on. Then in order to watch that show they have to wait until it’s on to watch the show or at least record it for later viewing. For this reason, many people find it much more reasonable and convenient to just go ahead and pirate the show to stream at their own leisure.

Though I’m sure many people pirate simply because they don’t want to pay, and I’m sure those people will always exist regardless, it could be argued that piracy exists mainly because of the lack of adaptation by the media industry. Just look at how much services like Netflix and Spotify have managed to drop piracy in recent years. There is no doubt that people want their media streamed to them on demand and it looks like the industry is just now starting to acknowledge that.

Now another question is raised, why is the industry so slow at giving the people what they want, why are they refusing innovate? It’s really hard to tell whether a new model could potentially hurt the industry’s bottom line or if they just refuse to adapt like Block Buster or Kodak did. Since the media is essentially an oligopoly I would put my money on the fact that lack of competition allows them to be slow on the innovation side of things. Regardless of the reasoning, I feel it is safe to say that piracy is a direct outcry for adaptation.

How do you feel about piracy? Please share in the comment section.