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CONTENT vs. TRAFFIC
Remember the Gold Rush Days? Remember how difficult it was to obtain content, so many resorted to stealing, scanning, newsgroups etc...
It's not much different today. Until Traffic Providers turn into Studios... They can't do anything BUT steal.
It is somewhat of a symbiotic relationship, however messed up it is, it is a necessary evil. It is starting to become a bigger problem because wide-spread brand saturation without monetary gain for the producers, will eventually kill the industry if something isn't done to pacify this phenomenon.
EVERYONE wants a piece of the pie. They will do ANYTHING to get it. So, a mechanism needs to be put inbetween the WANT and SUPPLY to mute it's effects overall.
Some suggest DRM, however, this is quite costly for a producer to do, especially when the margins are dropping due to piracy & illegal saturation. My suggestion is that producers just start pushing their own traffic, lock out affiliates that you don't know personally, get contracts with traffic providers, and start closing up the content leaks.
If we start looking at this as straight business, develop long lasting relationships with traffic providers, and working together instead of against one another to try and turn a buck, something can be done. Imagine if each producer donated a fund to legal pursuits and hired a team of the best attorneys available for copyright infringement / piracy and started tieing these assholes up in court, jail etc... as well as pursuing the actual users who download the pirated material. The only way to really settle this is in court, by killing their resources, and time. Hitting them in the proverbial wallet, as it were.
DRM is a great idea, however what is being pirated is DVD content usually, and as far as I know there isn't much that can be done to secure a DVD. A guy can walk into any adult video store and buy a DVD, take it home, rip it and put it up for the world to download. It's just too easy. You can't DRM wrap a video store.
Most of this really comes down to internet surfers are becoming more and more intelligent in the ways of the net, and this industry used to lead web technology. We (The Industry) have become lazy, and stopped trying to improve, and the surfers have caught up to us.
As soon as a new technology comes out, someone will try and hack it. It's the way things are, and it may never change. Which challenges all of us to try and stay ahead of the game, and keep coming up with new things to slow the process down. Becoming sedentary in any business is the death of the business.
Our technologies are simple usually, and anyone with half a brain and some programming knowledge can reverse engineer what we do. This is why CocaCola protects it's formula so heavily. If someone could setup a lab and test a Coke, to break down exactly how to make it, and the ingredients were readily available at Safeway, CocaCola Co. would go out of business, because everyone would just make it for themselves.
Anyhow, I'm sure as time goes on and the problem becomes more and more of an issue, some people will start stepping up and doing what it takes to lock it all down.
Until then, we can only do our best with the tools we have. Until someone build new tools that we can work with.
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