Does Distrust Explain the Psychology of Piracy? >> The Far Side of Tech

There’s no question that many of the younger generation (I refuse to say “Generation Y”, sorry) currently have extraordinarily relaxed views about content ownership. This was the generation raised on Napster, Kazaa, and the birth and evolution of everything peer-to-peer. They are used to getting what they want, when they want it, and for very little cost and effort. Selfish? Perhaps. But is it so unreasonable to expect in our wired world that content be made easily available and at lower cost than physical media?

The International Herald Tribune has a great article up regarding a recent survey that puts media and entertainment industries among the lowest trusted when compared to about a dozen other general industries like insurance and health care. This result is hardly surprising. After treating all of their customers as potential criminals with rampant lawsuits and DRM constraints, how else would consumers react?

The article also makes an interesting point when it notes:

In follow-up studies in Britain and France of consumers under 35 years old, the world’s first generation of “digital natives,” the company found that many say they will not buy an entertainment company’s products because they don’t believe they are getting good value for their money. Four out of 10 in Britain said that, while more than half did so in France.

In a world where pirated material can be had free or for next to nothing, “value for money” takes on a new dimension: What value is a record company giving me when I pay full price for a CD, for instance, compared with when it’s free?

While this may just sound like a self-serving excuse by media thieves, I think there’s much more to it than that. The piracy movement is pressuring the media companies in ways that they’ve never been before. Without Napster, would the RIAA have been so ready to work together with Apple to make the iTunes store the premiere source for legitimate digital music? The same holds true for Bittorrent and Apple’s recent addition of TV shows and movies to the iTunes store.

Would we even be seeing TV networks streaming recent episodes for free without Bittorrent? Now that the entertainment industries have adopted these new forms of distribution they seem fairly obvious, but let’s not forget what made them a necessity in the first place.

The distrust of media companies by young people is even more telling when you look at the sort of brands they actually trust. This recent article at Marketing Daily lists the top fifteen trusted brands by “Gen Ys” (uhg), and makes the not-so-stunning observation that we trust brands that communicate in a “straightforward and stripped-down way, use plain packaging, and avoid excess.”

Who would have thought that being straightforward and honest to your consumers would make them trust you?!

So what to do? I’ll echo the Ars Technica analysis of the Herald Tribune article and say that rethinking the whole DRM mindset will go a long way towards making consumers value your products. If we buy something from you, we’d like to actually own it and do what we like with it. The last thing consumers want is for the line between “rental” and “ownership” to become so entangled as to be indistinguishable. If you don’t trust us with your content, how can we trust you?

Oh, and the indiscriminate criminalizing of your customers? That doesn’t really inspire the warm and fuzzies on our part.