Primarily because there's a tremendous amount of evidence that piracy is a distribution problem, not a legal problem. The issue here is that the media cartels w

Primarily because there's a tremendous amount of evidence that piracy is a distribution problem, not a legal problem. The issue here is that the media cartels would prefer to buy legislation to let them keep running their antiquated businesses without innovating and use legislation to just squash any challengers. If it was a purely legal problem, iTunes and Netflix wouldn't be kicking ass and making the music and movie/TV publishers so nervous. I pay for Netflix (and it is responsible for >95% of all my TV/movie consumption) because it's the most convenient way for me to watch movies and TV shows. It's certainly not cheaper than torrenting movies, and I'm a programmer - there's no technical barrier that prevents me from torrenting movies. But I still pay for Netflix rather than torrenting movies because it's convenient, easy, legal, and satisfies my needs. If you can hit the "easy", "affordable", and "satisfactory" points in your distribution scheme, you'll manage to capture a huge number of sales that'd otherwise be lost to piracy. The issue isn't "piracy", it's lost sales. The two are conflated way too often, and to our collective detriment. Literally nobody is hurt simply by the act of someone making an unauthorized duplication of a series of bytes. The problem is introduced when someone would have otherwise purchased whatever content they just copied. Simply copying files doesn't actually cost anyone anything - otherwise, I could just set up a couple of machines that transfer MP3s back and forth between themselves all day and put the RIAA out of business. The focus should be on "how do we capture lost sales?", rather than "how do we stop all unauthorized copying of our byte-sequences?" There are a lot of very smart, very successful people in the industry who believe and state that piracy is solved by modernizing distribution, and providing a legal way for people to get your goods that more convenient than the illegal methods. There's a lot of economic data and anecdotal evidence to suggest that they're right. There is a problem with the sale of counterfeit physical goods on the internet, though, which is an entirely separate problem, which probably needs much more targeted and specific legislation to address it.