[wisty]

I hate to sound like a fundamentalist economist, but ...

There's a demand for movies. If you cut off the source, fans will make their own. They won't be the same (lower budgets), and their distribution will be different (initially theatres, protected by contracts), and they will have more product placements, but they will still be there. You won't have LOTR, but you will still have low budget talky stuff, suspense thrillers, and so on.

Eventually, animation techniques will allow fans to collaboratively make big budget special effect movies.

If movie company's wanted, they could survive quite well on theatre takings, and release stuff on DVD simply as collector items (after they movies are leaked online anyway). They would have to make cutbacks, but they'd still survive.

The main difference is - what a consumer does in their own home should be sacrosanct. Telling a theatre not to leak a movie (as part of a commercial contract) is fine, but attacking consumers for ripping a DVD they bought is not.

[dexy]

There's also a huge demand for flights to the moon. Nobody supplies it because it'd be too expensive. Same thing for a LOTR that you couldn't charge for.

Where do you draw the line? Commercial entities? I'm sure I could raise funding for a non-profit that offered every ebook ever written for download. That would single-handedly destroy the ebook industry.

I never said movies would go away, but you wouldn't have Transformers and you wouldn't have LOTR. As you said, you'd have movies that are more locked-down in their distribution and you'd have more ads and product placement in films. All for what? So that you can freely share those films to lower your entertainment budget? So that indie films can take more market share because you prefer them? Because copyright law is already largely unenforceable?

I'm all for more lax punishment for piracy, lower fines, etc. I'm not for eliminating IP law.