Warner Bros Says Piracy Is Demand Proxy

While America’s entertainment industry may be strongly “anti-piracy” there is a turning attitude within the entertainment industry that is starting to recognise that piracy actually has some use. In fact big movie studio Warner Bros. Pictures are one of those companies with shifting views according to a TorrentFreak report. Apparently David Kaplan, the chief of anti-piracy operations at Warner Bros. explained that they view piracy as a proxy of consumer demand and that anti-piracy isn’t just viewed as a simplistic idea of enforcing copyright law. Instead they attempt to balance both enforcement and adjusting their business model to what consumers actually want, using piracy as proxy for this.

David Kaplan also commented that the Warner Bros. parent company Time Warner is ignoring some forms of copyright infringement such as fan art. Despite this liberal view on piracy, Warner Bros. continues to target commercial copyright infringers who stand to make a profit from copying their work. The easiest way for them to do this is legal actions against those mechanisms that allow people to profit from selling Warner Bros. work but if they can prevent piracy by keeping consumers happy and making sure they don’t need to resort to piracy then that is great to see and a more sustainable solution to the piracy problem.

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures