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Feels like there's a 10-year cycle of this:

1. Companies lock down access until everyone starts pirating, broadcast rights become increasingly worthless.

2. A company realizes that this is a great opportunity to provide easy access to all of the media and becomes wildly succesful. Broadcast rights suddenly become very valuable.

3. Goto 1

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Sadly, the lessons that businesses learn from this is "we should have better DRM so users have no alternative" and not "we should have less user hostile business models"

Having less control, having less hostile business practices, is leaving money on the table. And leaving money on the table is heresy to modern businesspeople.

Consumer rights only matter to these people if they are codified in a law and the consequences have teeth.

Which is interesting, considering most businesspeople would support spending money on advertisement. Many are even into "guerilla advertisement," where an ad company tries to fake organic, word-of-mouth popularity. You know, the exact kind of popularity that piracy tends to induce.

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