Is The End of Digital Piracy Nigh?

If anything, this will just force better protocols and more anonymous methods of sharing to do be developed. Piracy will never die, because P2P communication is in the Internet's DNA. The more dramatic the copyright holders' response, the clearer it is just how close we are to seeing the end of copyright as we know it.

Even without copyright content producers can make a living: Spotify is a great step to bypassing music piracy and cloud services like syncing and serving up content can effectively demand payment, but the keyword is service. Farmers don't get paid in perpetuity every time anyone sells the same kind of crop as them (even genetically engineered crops can only be patented for 17 years), they actually have to continue to produce - they have to work for a living. So too, will the fat-cat copyright monopolists. For better or worse, copyright is dead - get over it and innovate.

He does realize that they already do this, right? I have an email from a friend from around 2006, all in a panic over a notice from Comcast that his IP address had been caught on a not-very-legal torrent.