We’re always hearing about how one of the reasons for online piracy is that digital entertainment isn’t available in a cheap, timely and legal fashion. The Digital Content Guide lists the legal options available in Australia. Think that might be helpful? Think again.
Launched today, the Digital Content Guide is a web site listing services in Australia which offer legal access to streaming or download content. Music, movies, TV (with a separate breakout for sport) and games are already covered, and ebooks are promised in the near future. The site has been jointly developed by APRA AMCOS, ARIA, ASIA, the Copyright Agency, News Corp, Foxtel and Village Roadshow.
The intent might be worthy, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. You can browse by category and see everything listed, but if you want to know if a particular show or movie is available, or how much a particular service costs, you’re out of luck. All you have is a link to the service itself, so you’ll have to do your own research.
Given the choice between a static list of providers whose costs aren’t known offered here and the ability to search for a specific show or episode and download it instantly which piracy promises, I suspect many people will continue do the easy thing rather than the ethical thing. Education has a part to play in combatting piracy, but this kindergarten-level approach isn’t going to help.
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10 responses to “The Digital Content Guide Is A Pointless Attempt To Combat Piracy”
It’s also not all that comprehensive. Offhand I can see a few entries missing:
– PSN for movies (although they do have the XBox equivalent)
– Crunchyroll, Madman AnimeLab, Hanabee for anime
– HumbleBundle for games
It looks very much like the main sponsors dumped all of their own services into a bucket without bothering to actually look for alternatives.
Mmm, I too noticed some glaring omissions. It was also odd that they highlight the Apple App Store, Xbox marketplace, Playstation store, and Nintendo eShop: All services for walled systems that could hardly be missed by users.
My biggest problem with this initiative, aside from obvious problems such as funding, is the redundancy of Foxtel channels across the Film and Sports sections. I get that News Corp desperately needs money, but do they have to push so hard?
“You can browse by category and see everything listed, but if you want to know if a particular show or movie is available, or how much a particular service costs, you’re out of luck. All you have is a link to the service itself, so you’ll have to do your own research.”
Which makes the website pretty much useless. As it is, the website is nothing but free advertising for a few choice services.
On a different note, I’d laugh my ass off if somebody hacked the site to point to file lockers and torrent sites instead. Especially if/when this site starts getting flaunted in “educational” copyright infringement notifications.
Seriously… You have to be kidding me.
I just took a quick glance at the site and basically it’s just a list of services you are legally allowed to access in Australia not much more.
It doesn’t mention content, Price or compare the cost to what similar services in the US or UK offer.
It’s basically a waste of a website designed to keep technology illiterate people paying top dollar for content.
It’s a pointless waste of web space.
It seems to tout services like catch up TV sites (sbs on demand, 7 etc) as viable content sources. Since when have those sites ever been viable for watching content?. all content is deleted after 2 weeks and replaced and they literally only ever keep up to 10 shows at a time. Compare this to catch up TV in the US where you can watch entire seasons of a show or every episode ever made of a show for free.
Seriously? Nokia Ovi and the BlackBerry app store? Name one person who willingly still runs Symbian or uses a BlackBerry phone?
The entirety of the organisation which I work for, which has 10K+ employees.
EDIT: I should add, no one uses their work blackberrys for anything more than work, because everyone hates them.
I know businesses that still use BB, thats why I added ‘willingly’. So your edit proves my statement
It seems what they really need is a search engine that covers the content providers listed on the website.
Type in “Game of Thrones” and get links to the correct page Google Play, iTunes, Foxtel, etc. Make it really simple.
Show price comparisons between providers. Open up a service to allow content providers to apply to have their results shown alongside the others (providing API details to retrieve results, etc).
There already is such a site for PC games, it’s isthereanydeal.com. You can search for a particular game and then get all the prices from every online store in one place.
Also, if you are ok with going to Reddit, http://reddit.com/r/gamedeals has current deals from every platform