The thing with all of this is, true pirates ALWAYS find a way to continue their piracy. The best they can hope to do is to disuade the 'casual pirate'. Thing is that from what I can see, most of the people file sharing are tek savvy enough to quickly find a way around these measures with the help of the very small number of people who are 'scene' (the hard core guys, who tend to stay completely and utterly anonymous).
Take down the torretnt trackers? New ones spring up.
Get ISPs to block links? People use a VPN.
Block the ports used by VPN, VPNs change the ports and technology used.
As lots of you have said, attacking this head on just sends pirates around their flanks. You can't beat piracy with head on attack.
If they want to get casual pirates back as customers, they need to stop charing the same for crap movies as they do for decent ones. If you get a film for £10 and discover it's complete pants, you are going to start resisting spending another £10 for the next film etc... Been there, regretted the purchase, and would really love to be able to get a film cheap for just 1 viewing, then have to pay a larger fee (but still not the silly money presently charged) for permanent access. DRM isn't the answer though, it often leaves you with legally purchased stuff that you can't use because you had to reformat your hard drive too many times...
Some folks are starting to get things right though. Sky for example, I recently installed their Sky GO client, meaning if I miss something I want to see I can LEGALLY download it and view it for so many days, often for no additional charge on my existing subscription.
LoveFilm, some folks on here don't rate them highly, but our unlimited package allows us 4 discs at a time and UNLIMITED access to their "with package" movies and TV shows service. My wife has been absolutely hammering the horror films on there lately. lol
Heck, I have even bought films and TV shows on iTunes before now, but they seriously need to examine their pricing.
Things are even better over in the US, with sites like TheWB allowing you to watch your favourite shows, just like BBC iPlayer.
As to TPB, I can't help but thing that they kind of asked for it. Didn't have much effect though did it. lol
You know what I see as one of the biggest reasons for movie piracy? It's the slow assed release scheduling. I am sure that some folks just get sick of waiting between the cinema release of a movie and it's release on DVD/BluRay, so they go and grab a Region 5 pirate copy, often telling themselves they will buy it legally when it comes out if they like it, but then never getting around to it...
Besides all this focus on movies and music, they're not even the biggest rip offs or targets for piracy! Software is a bigger rip off! Look how many people run unlicenses copies of Windows for example (I bought mine legally. lol), often simply because they can't afford £70 -£79 for an OEM copy. Ok, you can do it legally and for free with a Linux distro, but there are a LOT of people out there who are just terrified at the idea (my mum for example, who wants a new pc, but as my parents are living on pension credits, the additional cost for Windows means she can't afford). Have Microsoft released a 'Windows Basic"? Well, they DID have Home Basic, but you can't get it now... The smart thing, release the 2 last versions for something like £15 for XP and £30 for Vista or something. Wont ever happen though. So people will continue to pirate it.
Ade
