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I remember, in the 80s, being able to buy a single cassette. That is, it held one song (perhaps with a value-added, not usually broadcast, 'long version' of the song or something).
KID1: Cool! You got popular_song_x!
KID2: Yeah, it has the long version, too.
KID1: I got a blank tape.. can I copy the long one? I already recorded the short one off the radio.
KID2: Sure. Here you go!
Note the bolded text. We would record the broadcast song and listen to that if we didn't have the actual album on casette, and we would buy the single to get a long version of the song.
Now, was it technically wrong to do this? Perhaps, but the industry surely knew it was being done and I don't recall them taking any particularly specific measures- even through its PR machine- to bring it to a halt. There weren't commercials saying to stop it, there weren't newspaper ads decrying the practice... it was as if they just didn't care. We grew up with that expectation, and got that behavior from them. They cooperated with people, kept producing content, and everyone was satisfied almost by unspoken agreement.
Enter the CD. The industry stopped selling cassettes in any real quantity and started putting their music on CD- but they never bothered to make CD singles. This is a crucial point, because CDs have only gotten cheaper and cheaper to make, but their retail prices haven't much changed. At the same time, people who wanted singles discovered it was just as easy to rip the entire CD as it was to rip a single track. If the CD single had always been there, I don't think people would have as quickly turned to downloading individual tracks as a way to fill the void, so to speak. Remember- this was a product we were used to, and had gotten used to buying, had in fact been outright encouraged to buy, which was suddenly and inexplicably not there. It was a terrible business decision, and I'd hate to guess how much money it has cost them.
I saw this happening, right along with the decline in the quality of music on the CD in favor of a whole lot of "filler" music just to 'fill' the CD, got completely disgusted with their entire pathetic mess of a business/industry, and abandoned them ten years ago. I only download music whose source recordings are unknown (such as classical recordings) and other, NON-RIAA music. As far as I'm concerned, the RIAA can go pound sand. I'm done with them and their flash-in-the-pan 'artists'. Feh.
The MPAA is a different story. We know they were glaringly wrong about a similar issue once- when they fought against a 'record' feature for VCRs. Had they won that case, none of the digital recording capability we have today would exist, from video-capturing digital cameras and phones to tv-in ports on video cards to DVRs. Thank whomever ruled against them for the foresight they expressed in their decision; despite being ruled against, once the MPAA embraced the concept of renting video tapes, their revenue in that respect exploded, and people started snapping up VCRs like mad. The phenomenon fed upon itself, and today represents a major portion of the final amount of cash a movie makes- to the point that, sometimes, you hear, "maybe it'll do better on DVD than it did at the box office and they can make up some of the loss". Sometimes, that's even true.
If the MPAA were to embrace Bittorrent in the same way they did the VCR, they could pull off the same trick once again. What they don't understand is that they need a good method for doing so (the new version of Azureus, called Vuze, provides a good example; I'm told it looks and feels a lot like Itunes). They also need to realize that the price needs to be lower than that of a DVD. Were they to set up and populate their own servers, a Bittorrent client could aggregate them for the user; all studios' films could appear in one place, with the ability to pay for them right then and there.
I plan on using Azureus/Vuze for precisely this purpose, as established networks such as the BBC, Showtime, A&E, and others are already starting to make some of their content available in this exact way. Obviously, the broadcasters already 'get' the fact that I'm not talking about some future application of future programming and future sharing methods- I'm talking about something that is already here, today, being done at this moment, all around the world. Bittorrent is establishing itself as a valid and viable means of content distribution, and the content production industries are utter fools to not sit up and take note of that fact.
People today might download a DVD, but if you want to watch it within any reasonable timespan, it makes more sense to go out and buy it. Further, most DVDs available for sale contain bonus features and other value-added content, making a stripped-down download version not worth the effort; the same is true for downloading the 'Disc 2 Bonus content'. While this might discourage sharing of DVDs online, services such as netflix make it easy for users to rip copies in their own homes. It has ever been thus with rental services, however, and I think the industry is coming to terms with the fact that it will ever be thus, HDCP notwithstanding.
The harder they try to tighten their grip on control of an inherently uncontrollable medium (it is in the nature of the bit to be copied), the more creative people will be in evading them, either through spoofing, cracking, or hard encryption of data transfers. It wouldn't surprise me to find that some clever hacker figures out how the MAFIAA is spying on users, and finds a way to spoof that information so it looks like it's, for example, a politician's name, address, etc.
Filesharing, and all its attendant uses, is here to stay. protocols cannot be uninvented; the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. There is nothing whatever that the idustry can do about it short of having an eye on the datastream of every Internet user in the country. They need to embrace it, find a way to harness, rather than fight it, or it will be a moving factor in the industry's ultimate demise.
The irony in that prospect? User content would fill the void. It's already happening; there's a ridiculous amount of very good, high-quality 'amateur' content out there (some of which looks pretty professional to me). Bittorrent et al are the future, and the Mafiaa ignores that at their peril.
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