I feel that piracy is a consumer response to poor quality. If only 10% of the movies / music released are good in my opinion. Do I really want to waste 90% of my money for a product you are unhappy with?

So going to see a movie that might/might not be good with another person will cost $20-$40 dollars depending on theaters and if you smuggled snacks in with you. That's a lot of money on something you can buy that you will get more use out of. For me that might be a DVD of the movie when it comes out. So the movie industry still makes its money off me.

Lets have a look back on the past though. Some of us might remember when VCRs came out that the movie industry was crying how it was the end of their industry. Well it was not and spun in MORE income in the sales of movies in stores. When cassette tapes came out it was going to destroy the music industry. Well that never happened again. further to that the movie industry has a great revenue stream in DVDs that is making way more money than VHS ever did (bet they are glad that they lost their court cases against home VCRs now).   

The Internet is simply a new medium and businesses will have to adapt and learn to make new revenue from that. We already have more music download sites than I could ever name, movie rental / download sites, movies on demand over cable (or IPTV), and items like the video ipod that are really starting to take off. 

The thing I see stopping this medium is Digital Rights Management (DRM). If this is the first time you have heard of DRM then its basically a copy protection scheme imbedded into the media file. Now the issue with this is that if you download something from iTunes with DRM you can play it on your computer and on your Ipod. You can not play this file on any other mp3 player, your car mp3 player, or a home stereo. This means that even though YOU legitimately purchased the music you can not play it on every device YOU own. You also get tied into the company you purchased it from. If you have a bunch of iTunes music and buy a Zune.... well have fun repurchasing all your music from the MS store.

I read something interesting today (which inspired me to write this post in the first place):

"In six years of tracking piracy, we’ve never seen a statistical difference in piracy of a popular song that was released without DRM and a popular song that was released with DRM.” 
-Eric Garland, CEO of the market research firm BigChampagne.

So if DRM has zero effect on piracy and only encumbers the user why keep going with it?

The answer to that is revenue (well for apple at least). Look at how many spin off  devices there are that use the iPod on the apple store alone! There are armbands, speakers that dock with the ipod, alarm clocks, video docks, gift certificates, remote controls,  armbands, and to my surprise... Ipod Shoes (yes the Nike runners talk your iPod nano about your run).

Apple figured it out that there is a lot of money to be made in the technologies surrounding the technologies and has turned this into a huge revenue stream. Why hasn't the music/movie industry realized that you adapt or die?

Now I don't like to rant about a problem without a few solutions or new ideas at least:
-Provide 48 hour movie downloads for free but with a link to buy them.
-Have samples of music / movies delivered to clients based on preference.
-Enable them to be played on a toaster if need be (please don't steal my idea for the video toaster)
-DRM free subscription services where people can download whatever they want and pay a low monthly fee
-Make the products you purchase have more to them (i.e. the extra features on a DVD)

For more reasons to hate DRM please read 30 days of DRM by Michael Geist. This was a post a day series about DRM and is so informative about this subject that my posts could never do it justice.

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