It can’t be denied that tech has impacted nearly every line of people’s life, and the emergence of piracy is one of negative impacts it generates. In Indonesia, the awareness towards piracy is still considerably low, considering that many Indonesians still regard every content available on internet to be free. Triawan Munaf, the Creative Economic Body’s Head, offered an idea on how to supress the amount of digital piracy cases, which is by equipping illegal digital content with alert system.

Triawan Munaf stated during the Indigo Apprentice Awards (IAA) 2015 that alert system has been implemented in South Korea and France, being utilized as one of methods of combating digital piracy.

“In South Korea and France, the Alert System has been implemented, I think this is necessary to be applied in Indonesia as well in case digital creative players intend to develop similar app,” he said.

Further, he explained that the system is able to track down illegal downloads of digital content and warn the downloaders about their crimes. If they still insist on doing so, the internet operator may “punish” them by decreasing the download speed.

“The first warning states that the content is illegal and the users will be redirected to legal ones. If they insist on downloading the file, then operator will decrease the download speed. In South Korea, the piracy decreased no less than 50% after the system was applied,” Munaf claimed.

He argued that it will be much more effective than shutting websites down. As we all know that couple of times ago, the Association of Indonesia Recording Industry has asked the government, in this case the Ministry of Communication and Information, to shut illegal music providing websites down.

This approach does make sense. Shutting websites will only trigger similiar websites to emerge. By educating the people that piracy isn’t a noble thing to do, the effect will be more continuous. The key of piracy isn’t the media or technology, but people’s awareness to the value of one’s work.