Piracy is a new type of business model, says journalist and best-selling author Matt Mason. An expert in cheating the system, Mason advocates piracy as a way to force old laws to catch up with the new ways information is being used.
Mason was a former pirate radio DJ and founding editor of the British counter-culture magazine site RWD, which was launched to bridge the gap between music pirates and the mainstream market. He admits to downloading all sorts of pirated material and describes BitTorrent as one of the easiest ways to get music.
But his biggest critics aren’t the music industry or Hollywood.
“I’m seen by some people in the downloading community as the bad guy,” he said, adding that he’s different from those who think of piracy as a “smash-the-system, anarchic movement” where everything is free.
Mason will be presenting his ideas this week in Camden, Maine, at the annual PopTech conference that explores the impact of technology on people.
In his book released last year, The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth
Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, Mason discusses ways in which businesses can actually learn from pirates' ways.
“The whole point of the book is that piracy is often highlighting some kind of market failure. When the market’s not doing something that most people want to see happening, that’s when you see piracy on a massive scale,” he said.
For example, he thinks record labels need to work on a free market, collective license solution, and that e-books will soon pose a similar threat to the publishing world.
“I’m convinced that Steve Jobs is currently working on a double-sided touchscreen laptop, which has a great screen density so you can hold it on its side and you can touch it and turn pages. When something like that comes along, then the e-book’s going to be a real threat. And I think the publishing industry is going to collectively crap its pants.”
His ideas are also seeping into Hollywood. He says he is currently working with Heroes executive producer Jesse Alexander on a TV version of the book called Pirate TV.
Each episode of the show will focus on piracy in various industries around the world, many of which are not often associated with the term
— like fashion, nuclear technology and automobile parts.
“It’s going to be two parts Anthony Bourdain, one part Mythbusters,” he says. He’s already planned out one season, but says there are enough different cases to fill five or six.
And Mason isn’t hypocritical by any means, as his own book is also up for grabs on his website, following the Radiohead, tip-jar business model of pay what you want.
But he says around 15 percent of people actually pay for it, and that downloads not only don’t cannibalize print sales, they have opened up the door to speaking events all over the world where it isn’t being sold and people are reading it online.
At PopTech, he’ll be reinforcing his message of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
“A lot of the time it’s because the pirates are actually doing something better, and that doesn’t mean it’s always right or its morally good in any way at all,” he says.
