I didn't mean to imply that DRM-free video stores can't work; I meant that (a) torrents themselves are nigh-impossible to monetize, and (b) suits at Big Content

I didn't mean to imply that DRM-free video stores can't work; I meant that (a) torrents themselves are nigh-impossible to monetize, and (b) suits at Big Content will never feel comfortable with opening up their precious data, even though you and I know that the raw data exists already. Though millions are sometimes spent to market music, that's peanuts compared to the costs of producing movies and television, and that money won't get spent without some confidence that it can be recouped. It's one thing for Louis CK to gamble $0.2M on a DRM-free standup special, and another for Disney to gamble $220M on a DRM-free Avengers. > How is this any different from the situation right now with DVDs and Blu-rays? You can copy videos very easily. Nerds can, but DVD ripping is still much less friendly to regular people compared to MP3 swapping, and requires much more work to play back compared to iPods and CD burning. If the industry ever got behind open standards, eventually many more people would pirate movies instead of just college kids. Borrowing a DVD from a friend would be no different than taking it permanently, resulting in fewer total sales. Don't get me wrong: DRM is a plague. Hell, I'd even support a tax that made all content part of a universal digital library, with funds distributed proportionally to usage. But without somehow creating a new economic system for digital content, every "rational actor" is going to do whatever they can to maintain maximum leverage. The only reason the RIAA caved was that the damage was already done, and they had lost most of their leverage already. (Also, it was something of a ploy to give Amazon an advantage over iTunes, which was enjoying a brief hegemony over paid music downloads; user freedom was a happy side effect.)