Steam Model
The major root of the whole problem of internet piracy of copyrighted content really is the fact that the MPAA/RIAA and associated global arms are stuck in an old and unworkable business model. The heads of this business are old fat-cats who are too happy with their fingers in their ears yelling 'LA LA LA LA LA' to block out the chorus of the internet crying out for change.
The old model guaranteed high profits, and loads of industry control because the means of distributing content were often limited to moving physical property from place to place. The duplication of film stock and audio recordings was limited to certain companies authorized to do such work.
The advent of the home VCR and even the cassette tape were the first stage in the loss of control of content distribution, you could connect two VCRs or tape players together and make as many duplicates of the content as you wanted. It was a time consuming process and the MPAA/RIAA didn't like it but not much could really be done, and the rates of piracy were still relatively low mainly due to the time required and loss of quality in the duplicates, so this didn't force the industries into a rethink of their business model.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and the rise of the Personal Computer and the Internet was such a fast and wide reaching thing that the MPAA/RIAA didn't have time to really look at and arrive with a new business model. They just stuck their heads in the sand and hoped it would go away. It didn't. The PC and Internet made it possible to almost perfectly duplicate the original copyrighted work in an extremely short time, with very little quality loss, and made distribution of these duplicate works extremely easy and fast. The MPAA/RIAA tried to sue as many people as they could but it turned into a PR disaster, such large and powerful organisations picking on little Johnny in his mothers basement, and in some cases, little Johnny's mother.
It is high time that the Film and Music industries finally conceeded defeat and came up with a new modern business model that will make everyone happy. My idea is this...
Steam, from Valve Software.
It's the perfect idea for this kind of content access and distribution. Sure it will require some small tweaks to make it apply to Video and Audio files, but the idea is just the same. Sure there is stuff like iTunes but they are hold-overs from the tightly controlled (DRM) distribution model of old, and they need to be scrapped.
A studio needs to make their works available within the 'Steam' style framework where a user's content library is stored in the system. Newly released content is made available from a central server but as it gets downloaded, the system starts using a P2P model where once there is a critical mass, the central server basically becomes a backup for the P2P version of the file. As for the purchasing of music or films, you access the store, you pay a small amount of money, say a couple of dollars for an album, or maybe $5 for a feature film. You get a perpetual license to the content, if you loose it you can just download another copy from the P2P pool, you can freely copy the file to other systems and access it whenever and whereever.
Then the store can have deals on content. Like all the bond films? Instead of paying $300 for DVDs of the whole thing, you can pay like $50 and get all of them. Is it the holiday season? 30% discount on all the crappy holiday season films. Want to keep the Cinemas in business? All latest released stuff still gets screened at the Cinema but keep your ticket which has a redemption code for a free or heavily discounted digital copy of the movie from the Store.
The whole issue is pricing the content at a point where everyone thinks 'Meh, it's only a few bucks, i'll buy it" the same thought process can be seen with movies that didn't do so well at the box office in the bargain basement bin at the local shopping complex. "Some Crappy Movie for $8, it was an ok movie, i'll grab it for $8, no big deal" The bonus of doing the content distribution digitally instead of over physical media is with the Store/P2P approach is that the Industry doesn't have to pay or pays almost nothing for distribution, it's pure profit. Where as the $8 DVD in the bargain basement bin still has to pay shipping, manufacturing, wages, etc up the line and will make almost no money in the end.
Then comes the added benefits from the Store based approach. Have a single unified store. Sure it will be a monopoly but if it represented the whole of the global content industries, the cost of running the thing can be shared easily, thus making the running cost of it for any particular company rather small, and leaving them with even more profit. It also avoids market segmentation with people having content on multiple services. Also with the monopoly store approach, there is a guarantee that the store will always exist, thus keeping everyone's purchases 100% safe forever. The game stores (Like Steam) have a problem of if the parent company shutters the service what happens to the user's legally purchased content. This is a non-issue for a global, industry-wide service.
Next comes the metrics that could be data-mined from each user in an anonymous fashion. They could work out what films/music people like the most and produce more of that type of content, thus fueling more sales.
This is something I thought of for about the whole of 20mins, why is it so hard for the content industries to come up with something like it!