These things come in waves. I remember in the early 90s when organised piracy was rife. There were courier groups transferring data between BBS systems, betwe

These things come in waves. I remember in the early 90s when organised piracy was rife. There were courier groups transferring data between BBS systems, between countries, usually committing various kinds of telephone and bank fraud in their activities either to make long distance phone calls to transfer data on by modem, or to purchase hardware to store the data on. These were people who often did it for the love or status, and not for money. However, at the same time, these large boards would make money from selling tapes of the software, and others would sell floppy disks and CDs with the software on. The end consumer would end up having easy access to pirated software through friends, markets and other means. Then a crackdown happened, and it was an international effort. People weren't all taken down directly for piracy, others were taken for fraud or anything else related to their activities in the piracy scene. Some of it would fail in court, but it would be after a year of not having access to their computer equipment. Several years later we had Napster, and easy access to pirated music was in the hands of the normal user again, until Napster had to give up. Now with torrents, we had something that resembled the scene of the early 90s closer. The crackdown is also similar. After Napster we ended up with services like iTunes, last.fm and Spotify, and I think post torrent crackdown we should hopefully end up with similar video services giving us a choice between buying or renting videos for cheap or for free. I'm optimistic that we'll see some improvement in the video delivery business over the coming years. It won't be as cheap as using btjunkie etc. and it won't have as wide a selection, but hopefully not too far from it for the bulk of consumers.