From Piracy to Digital Parasitism
There’s no need to remind the early ages of the Internet when content producers, artists, and media creators were disappointed and frustrated by the emerging phenomenon of #piracy. Piracy was known (in its early days) as a critical disaster wiping out billions of capital from the media and content industry. But thanks to the #evolution, the killer was heavily weakened by the critical and effective growth of the #intellectual_property regulation and most importantly, the #platforms itself that provided brand new instruction of content creation, content usage, and so content sharing process. Despite the exponential progress made in IP (Intellectual Property), we cannot celebrate the complete demise of the problem, however, it can be considered. But even if piracy reaches its end, the media sphere is now suffering from a new disease we call Digital Parasitism.
What does Digital Parasitism Stand for?
The phrase #digital_parasitism is derived from and made up of the word #parasite, a plant or animal that lives on or in another plant or animal and gets food from it. As the meaning suggests, you may have found the tip in the phrase. The phrase implies a certain process during which, the users are using the idea, gist, context, and kernel of the others’ content, to produce their own content or have their own effect on their audiences. In other words, if we consider the content as digital food, #digital_parasitism is known as using the content of other users, to feed your own audiences. Referring to the ideas, quotes, and concepts of the others’ content, are different sides of Digital Parasitism. Despite Piracy, Digital Parasitism is a harder problem to tackle for it is not that simple to learn, recognize, discover, and prove, a similar idea or content, through the crowded, complex, and interwoven world of the Internet.
Digital Parasites consume your ideas and perspective rather than your flesh and organ
So what’s the solution?
Like Piracy, this one seems to be a bump in the road that will easily be removed by the further evolution of the #platform_business. But even now, there are established ways and means that we consider critical weapons for tackling the problem. Techniques like sharing content (Retweet for instance), publishing the content on related platforms, and reaching the highest amount of oriented audiences (the old-fashioned #critical_mass), are proven solutions to deal with Digital Parasites.
