Anti-piracy efforts, too confronting: IPAF
The Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation has changed its approach to copyright infringement, after identifying previous efforts as ‘confronting’.
“The tone for all anti-piracy advertisements has been very confronting. We need to find a tone of engagement, to use humour to portray the way people see themselves in regards to piracy,” IPAF CEO Gail Grant told Encore.
“That’s the beauty of our new research – 34 percent of the Australian public pirate regularly, and they don’t’ agree with it morally, but they don’t make the connection between their actions and their consequences.
“People don’t see themselves as being pirates or participating in piracy; they don’t respond to an aggressive or accusatory tone,” she added.
IPAF has started a new campaign – including a TV/cinema spot and an online quiz – targeting what the foundation has identified as ‘accidental pirates’, to educate them about the consequences of their actions. According to Grant, people clearly perceive a level of respect and responsibility when it comes to physical property, but there isn’t a widespread understanding of intellectual property and why it must also be respected.
The campaign will be supported by Hoyts-owned cinema advertising company Val Morgan (“they recognise that the health of the industry is part of their market, so they support it wholeheartedly”) and pay TV platforms Foxtel and Austar.
IPAF does not count the free-to-air broadcasters in its membership, but it does have a relationship with the Media Federation of Australia. “They’ll help us to put in submissions to FTA to get the spots on the air; they are just as affected by content theft as any other organization in this arena,” said Grant.
Grant believes that digital technologies are partly to blame, not just because they facilitate distribution of content, but most importantly, because of the perception of free content that they have created.
“I started in this business in 1983, when home entertainment was emerging. Before, you went to the movies and that was the only way you could see them; rental and then retail came along and that meant you could take home your favourite movie or show.
“But in the last 10 years technology has spread so rapidly that it has blurred the lines, because it moved so fast and made so many different options available. It has probably contributed [to the situation] because so much content is available at so many different levels that it has confused the issue and blurred the lines of what’s acceptable and what isn’t,” explained Grant.
