[Gotttzsche]

i may be out of the loop, but... none of the popular ways of piracy are generally encrypted are they? if all the unencrypted ones were to be shut down, would it be possible to replace them with safe ones?

i mean with public p2p filesharing, you can always "spy" on the sharers. i mean it has the be decryptable for you to download it, right? and youll know who sent it.

and with stuff that hosted somewhere, whether it's some usenet provider or megaupload, you can always shut down the hoster.

people could still pirate by directly sending each other encrypted files, but you'd always have to know someone personally who has what you want. which would make piracy much harder.

why am i wrong? ;)

[chimeracoder]

Just because it's not the dominant means of exchange today doesn't mean it couldn't be.

Ten years ago, the analogous reasoning would have been 'Well, we can just shut down the Napster server', or shortly after 'Well, we can just shutdown the Gnutella superpeers'.

[Gotttzsche]

you ignored the problem i saw with it. if there's no public component to it and people would only share with their friends, the availability of piracy would be severely limited.

and if there is, the content industry could still get their "spies" in.