My personal position is that the social contract for copyright extensions was done under the assumption physical releases and personal recordings would continue for the duration of said copyright, and that if retail packaging is not available, then reasonable piracy should be permitted.
Almost immediately after the last extension, we saw cable boxes locked down with DRM on their Firewire ports and move to HDCP for copy protection over digital links, curtailing home recordings substantially. Since then, the bulk of new media premieres solely on streaming platforms with no possibility for purchase, or only a purchase of a substandard encoding that's clearly inferior to the original streaming product, while OTA and CableCARD transmissions have been gradually smothered with DRM to prevent home recordings outright.
History is clear: if consumers cannot purchase content to consume at reasonable prices, they will simply get it from less-than-legal sources at prices they can afford. Piracy is not a problem of enforcement, it is a problem of consumer cost.
Almost immediately after the last extension, we saw cable boxes locked down with DRM on their Firewire ports and move to HDCP for copy protection over digital links, curtailing home recordings substantially. Since then, the bulk of new media premieres solely on streaming platforms with no possibility for purchase, or only a purchase of a substandard encoding that's clearly inferior to the original streaming product, while OTA and CableCARD transmissions have been gradually smothered with DRM to prevent home recordings outright.
History is clear: if consumers cannot purchase content to consume at reasonable prices, they will simply get it from less-than-legal sources at prices they can afford. Piracy is not a problem of enforcement, it is a problem of consumer cost.