The New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) has announced a new digital piracy campaign and consumer awareness initiative. The ‘Create the Next Spot Contest’ asks creative students in New York City to design the next public service announcement to address digital piracy and encourage teens and young adults to consider the impact of content theft. This is the next phase of a campaign first launched by the Mayor’s Office in 2007 to combat illegal sales and distributions of DVDs.

With piracy now prevalent online, the multimedia campaign ‘Piracy Doesn’t Work in NYC’ was launched Citywide in 2010, with the support of the creative industry and government partners, to raise awareness and educate New Yorkers about the threat of digital piracy to the jobs of nearly 700,000 New Yorkers who make their living working in or supporting the creative industries. That campaign was seen in taxis, online, on local television and on bus shelters across the City. Since the launch of ‘Piracy Doesn’t Work in NYC’ the City has worked with various partners to help further examine the issue. Following the launch of last year’s campaign, Sucherman Consulting Group conducted focus groups to assess its impact and concluded that while young people are among the most likely to pirate digital content there is significant opportunity for education and increased awareness within that age group.

“New York is the global capital of the entertainment, media and creative sectors of the economy, and an increasingly important centre of film production,” said Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel. “Protecting the work generated by these sectors – and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that go with it – is a priority for the Bloomberg Administration. Continuing to strengthen our anti-piracy efforts is critical to ensuring that New York continues to be the destination of choice for creative talent from around the five boroughs and around the globe.”

“New York City is at the forefront of the entertainment industry, and we need to deliver the message that digital piracy costs real New Yorkers real jobs,” said Mayor’s Media & Entertainment Commissioner Katherine Oliver. “By encouraging teens to speak to each other about the issue of digital piracy in the Create the Next Spot Contest, we hope to inform a new demographic and influence change in order to strengthen our entertainment industry for generations to come.”

“It is imperative that we come up with new solutions to stop digital piracy and protect jobs in the creative industry,” said John Feinblatt, Chief Policy Advisory to Mayor Bloomberg. “We are proud to be a leader nationwide and are always focusing on ways to be even more effective in the fight against piracy.”

Categories: Articles, Content, Piracy