The big problem is the system of copyrights and licensing, which was designed in a time before there were even VCRs, and has never been looked at to be updated and especially not globalized.
So now we live in a world which has become tiny, thanks to the internet, and people expect the internet to be free of national boundaries, and the world of copyrights and licensing is all about national boundaries and instead of making efforts to bring it into the present, legislators are trying to reify the old system which never worked well to begin with.
And then we let special interest groups from the industry, like RIAA and MPAA, try to further entrench the old, broken system and we let them set the terms of the debate, with words like piracy (suggesting that someone was forcibly denied of their own property) and dollar figure estimates of "loss" that have never, ever been substantiated, and can't be, because we can't know how much of something people didn't buy. Worse, a lot of the "piracy" estimates are based on counterfeiting, which is just fine by the RIAA/MPAA types, as they see dl's as counterfeit product, but it doesn't work financially, because we're not buying dl's, it's not like the actual bootleg CDs and DVDs that people sell on street corners.
Long story short: none of this changes until there are new international treaties on copyright and media licensing. And who's trying to create them right now? No one.
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So now we live in a world which has become tiny, thanks to the internet, and people expect the internet to be free of national boundaries, and the world of copyrights and licensing is all about national boundaries and instead of making efforts to bring it into the present, legislators are trying to reify the old system which never worked well to begin with.
And then we let special interest groups from the industry, like RIAA and MPAA, try to further entrench the old, broken system and we let them set the terms of the debate, with words like piracy (suggesting that someone was forcibly denied of their own property) and dollar figure estimates of "loss" that have never, ever been substantiated, and can't be, because we can't know how much of something people didn't buy. Worse, a lot of the "piracy" estimates are based on counterfeiting, which is just fine by the RIAA/MPAA types, as they see dl's as counterfeit product, but it doesn't work financially, because we're not buying dl's, it's not like the actual bootleg CDs and DVDs that people sell on street corners.
Long story short: none of this changes until there are new international treaties on copyright and media licensing. And who's trying to create them right now? No one.