The problem isn't "some guy sharing a DVD with his father-in-law". Cheap hard drives capable of storing every movie worth watching already exist. Flash media ca

The problem isn't "some guy sharing a DVD with his father-in-law". Cheap hard drives capable of storing every movie worth watching already exist. Flash media capable of storing a year's worth of new interesting movies are about the same expense. Replace "a DVD" in your scenario with "every movie more than a year old" and it complicates your position. If lots of guys share "every movie more than a year old" with their fathers-in-law, who cares about sharing online? Sharing online is dangerous, and slow. Maybe you get the absolute latest media, but most of the latest media won't survive the test of time anyway. You think that shutting down the ad supported streaming services will solve the problem, but they're small fry compared to what's coming. By the time I send my kids to college, they will take with them a phone capable of storing 2,000 TB: enough capacity for everything that has established classic value in human history, in their pocket. Everyone will. Recognizing that online sharing is slow and risky and mostly important for the last year's worth of unevaluated new media, they could basically forego the public Internet altogether during their studies. They wouldn't be sharing media with their new friends because their friends would also already have everything that matters. They'll pay to watch the latest movies, but outside of box office sales no one will have any idea how popular movies actually are because there will be no external record of performances and the number of "copies" of a movie that exist will approach the number of personal computing devices. Grooveshark generating revenue off of unlicensed media might sting, but in less than a decade the ability to know who has a copy of a piece of media and how many times it has been watched is going to disappear completely. It will certainly take an Orwellian state to enforce copyright then.