Many people, including me, think that the entertainment industry is taking the wrong approach to dealing with piracy. They are using old methods to deal with a type of crime (if you even accept calling it that) never seen before.
Unlike physical stealing, there is no limit to the number of "stolen" copies that can be made. It's also much easier to cover your tracks in the online world. A close friend won't recognize your TC/IP "face" under the "mask" of a VPN or proxy. Yet they still try to use lawsuits and threats of criminal action to stop the largest activity in terms of bandwidth on the internet.
So if people will pirate as long as they want to, how can the industry remove that desire?
Easy. Ask any filesharer, Would you rather download a movie on BitTorrent, or instantly stream it with no threat of legal action whatsoever? Chances are, you will get streaming. And it's already partially possible with Netflix and Amazon VOD.
They would never pay, you say? A large number of BitTorrent users use VPN services, as well as the torrent-specific proxy Torrentprivacy, to prevent their real IP address from showing up. These services usually cost 100 USD (around 67 euros) a year.
The current problem is that while Netflix offers unlimited streaming of their "Instant" movies, most titles, especially recent ones, aren't available. And while amazon offers almost all new DVD releases for on-demand streaming, there is no "all-you-can-eat" subscription to please pirates accustomed to unlimited entertainment.
The toughest problems with paid streaming? Cost and release dates. Even with a low price, paid streaming will probably be a tough sell, but I'm confident that if the price is reasonable (I'd pay anything under $20/month), it will succeed. The second issue is obvious to those familiar with filesharing networks.
Usually, a DVD-quality copy will leak out a month or two before the DVD release. And almost DVD-quality releases, knows as R5s, become available even sooner, depending on the movie. R5 releases are ripped from a DVD released to Russia and nearby countries, DVD region 5, hence R5. Region 5 gets early DVD releases thanks to the prominence of bootleg. Since speech is in Russian, prominent pirates replace the audio with the best English audio track out there, which means that quality can be anywhere from pure cr** to pure DVD.
This will be a tough sell with the movie industry, but one possibility is for streaming sites would be to match the shrinking release groups by releasing a streaming copy as soon as a quality pirated version is out.
Another problem is portable devices, but it is my belief that all devices will have reliable, fast, mobile internet by the time the industry accepts any of the above.
As you can see above, I think that the best way to address the problem of piracy without making a painful change to copyright law (two ways that could go), is to give consumers what they want without having to pirate.
Thoughts and alternative ideas are welcome. Don't hold back, even if you think it sounds stupid. I can tell that quite a bit of this sounds stupid, but it's what I think can reconcile Hollywood and the people. And I think the world should hear it. After all, the internet is all about free speech.
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