Sound Smarter in Sixty Seconds (SSISS) is Mothership’s daily brief on the important headlines of the day. We will also contribute our views on the issues at hand.

More than 6 in 10 adults in Singapore engaged in online piracy 

A survey of 900 Singaporeans revealed that 61 per cent of adults downloaded pirated content online, of which 66 per cent of them acknowledged what they did was similar to stealing. Youths consumed more pirated content than adults and 80 per cent of them considered it a social norm.

While industry players continue to say that piracy will damage local industries and affect content owners and broadcasters, the high rates of piracy show that people are not willing to pay for content if they can find it for free.

In recent years, several web-streaming services, especially from China, have made pirated content easily accessible. They come with legitimate looking websites and even have Android/Apple apps which further shape a perception that streaming content online may not be shady business.

Broadcasters and content providers should start to think about ways to provide 'freemium' services as an alternative to capture this market. It is not known whether people who pirate content would actually pay broadcasters for it if pirated streaming sites were blocked in the first place. Their efforts at stopping piracy could be better channeled to providing better value-add to draw consumers.

Singapore wasted close to 800,000 tonnes of food last year

The National Environment Agency released this statistic earlier this month. This represented a sharp increase of food wastage from 2012's 703,200 tonnes or a 13.2 per cent increase. Previous increases were in the range of 1.6 to 6.7 per cent.

Hunger and starvation is not something you would associate Singapore with. The bright side of an increase in food wastage shows that Singapore is prosperous enough to meet one of the basic needs of humans. However, more needs to be done to ensure that this wasteful attitude does not take root in Singapore, be it food wastage at home or by businesses.

Top image from PC Techmag.

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