As a huge fan of many big-budget TV shows and movies, I am not inclined to gloat about the death of the content industry until there's a viable replacement busi

As a huge fan of many big-budget TV shows and movies, I am not inclined to gloat about the death of the content industry until there's a viable replacement business model. It's easy to criticize the content industry for their abusive practices and outdated business model, and point to something like the direct sales approach, which has had encouraging successes in books and music. But it's wholly unproven on the budgetary scale of, say, Game of Thrones, Lost, or The Avengers. And if content is distributed freely (through lending or otherwise), then it may be that the creators cannot recoup their costs, and this content simply won't be made. It's possible that a Kickstarter-like model will emerge, but that's far from guaranteed, and I observe that Kickstarter projects themselves operate on a "scarcity emulator." For example, projects often provide artificially exclusive digital content at certain funding levels. It may come down to a conscious choice to accept some limitations on our personal digital property rights in order to enable something we can all enjoy. We make that same tradeoff in the meat world all the time: you cannot block a river, sunlight, a view, a storm drain, etc. even though they're on your property. I would prefer limiting my property rights to that content over that content disappearing altogether. Lastly, pirates are no allies of personal property rights. Pirates distribute unambiguously stolen content (for example, the X-Men Origins workprint) just as readily as merely copyrighted content.