These things come in waves. I remember in the early 90s when organised piracy was rife. There were courier groups transferring data between BBS systems, between countries, usually committing various kinds of telephone and bank fraud in their activities either to make long distance phone calls to transfer data on by modem, or to purchase hardware to store the data on. These were people who often did it for the love or status, and not for money. However, at the same time, these large boards would make money from selling tapes of the software, and others would sell floppy disks and CDs with the software on. The end consumer would end up having easy access to pirated software through friends, markets and other means. Then a crackdown happened, and it was an international effort.
People weren't all taken down directly for piracy, others were taken for fraud or anything else related to their activities in the piracy scene. Some of it would fail in court, but it would be after a year of not having access to their computer equipment.
Several years later we had Napster, and easy access to pirated music was in the hands of the normal user again, until Napster had to give up.
Now with torrents, we had something that resembled the scene of the early 90s closer. The crackdown is also similar.
After Napster we ended up with services like iTunes, last.fm and Spotify, and I think post torrent crackdown we should hopefully end up with similar video services giving us a choice between buying or renting videos for cheap or for free.
I'm optimistic that we'll see some improvement in the video delivery business over the coming years. It won't be as cheap as using btjunkie etc. and it won't have as wide a selection, but hopefully not too far from it for the bulk of consumers.
You can make it illegal but you cannot make it unpopular.
In the last decade torrent, emule, kazaa made p2p downloading easier and popular, but search was not very good so people did use websites to search the files.
But before that we used to have warez ftp sites with upload download ratio and other checks.
there is tamil proverb which means "Thief would be always ahead of the Cop"
these things would go underground and mutate into a system which will fix vulnerabilities and would become impossible to detect and penetrate
> I wonder if consumers (as opposed to power users) would still pirate.
The practise will just move back into the physical world more. The people in a social group who have the know-how and access will pass the resulting content further into the group. Once it is a file on a local disk it can spread by the old fashioned methods rather easily. The base consumers that want to won't obtain the material directly, but they'll get access easily enough indirectly and after that they'll be able to pass it on the low-tech way too.
It'll be less convenient for them, but far from impractical. It might reduce casual/opportunistic piracy (oh, it's free?, go on then) but not anything that affects bottom lines: those that want the content but don't want to pay will still find a way not to pay.
Aye but with many people having nice speedy connections transferring copies directly over networks or less directly via P2P options is often more convenient even for non technical people. Sometimes the USB stick or written DVDs is still more convenient now of course, even for technical types. If the online options get more complex the physical option will increasingly become the more common choice.
People weren't all taken down directly for piracy, others were taken for fraud or anything else related to their activities in the piracy scene. Some of it would fail in court, but it would be after a year of not having access to their computer equipment.
Several years later we had Napster, and easy access to pirated music was in the hands of the normal user again, until Napster had to give up.
Now with torrents, we had something that resembled the scene of the early 90s closer. The crackdown is also similar.
After Napster we ended up with services like iTunes, last.fm and Spotify, and I think post torrent crackdown we should hopefully end up with similar video services giving us a choice between buying or renting videos for cheap or for free.
I'm optimistic that we'll see some improvement in the video delivery business over the coming years. It won't be as cheap as using btjunkie etc. and it won't have as wide a selection, but hopefully not too far from it for the bulk of consumers.