"Pirates do vote with their wallets -- they keep their wallets closed and don't support any players in the market." But yet, they still take the content. It's

"Pirates do vote with their wallets -- they keep their wallets closed and don't support any players in the market." But yet, they still take the content. It's a half-hearted and disingenuous form of boycott. If the goal were really to send Hollywood a message, and to take an absolute moral high ground in doing so, then wouldn't a more effective message be sent in not consuming the product whatsoever? Not buying it and not pirating it? For what it's worth, I don't disagree whatsoever with your anger toward the industry, or with your critiques of their business practices. The only functional difference in our positions is that I don't try to pretend that downloading a product I haven't paid for is somehow justified by a post-facto moral facade I bolt onto my actions. Now, all of that aside, let's get to the heart of the matter here: people enjoy quality content. Hollywood produces a lot of quality content (despite Michael Bay's best attempts to undermine that fact). What people enjoy about Hollywood is the production side of the business. What they don't enjoy is the distribution side. Historically, those two have been intertwined because production -- in and of itself -- is not profitable. It is the cost center of the industry. Spending $200MM to produce a tentpole movie, or even $2MM to produce a little indie movie, is an investment that can only generate a return when packaged, distributed, and monetized somehow. Therein lies the challenge. We all want Hollywood to make product, but we don't want Hollywood to sell us that product. Eventually, Hollywood might pull out of the distribution side of the business altogether, and find a way to monetize its production by charging its distributors (Apple, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) higher fees of some stripe. But eventually, those fees will get passed onto the consumer, one way or the other.