Just as the global war against terror obfuscated the debate through the rhetoric of shock and awe, the war against piracy relies on a similar strategy that conceals rather than illuminates some of the key questions. Rather than just seeing media piracy as a legal or a moral problem, it would be more accurate to see it as a global pricing problem. High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. Media piracy arises when market failures meet increasingly cheap and improved infrastructures (bandwidth, hardware) of information transmission. The war against piracy addresses only one axis of the debate and as with all wars which are being lost, you hope to win by heightening the rhetorical stakes.

Source: The Hindu August 24, 2016 19:07 UTC