There are always going to be people who just plain grab stuff. That ship has long since sailed. For better or worse, we're shifting to digital media now, and the people who break/remove DRM from said media has consistently beaten the people who create it. More importantly, entities like iTunes (and now Louis C.K.) have shown that you can maintain a profit by removing the DRM and giving the people a clean product.

We're already living in a world where you can easily get a digital product for free, whether it's a movie or a tv show or a song or an ebook, so I think the only thing that's left to do is to radically shift all of these industries so that their content becomes just as easy to obtain legally as it is to pirate.

I seem to recall someone, I think it was Joel Spolsky, talking about Napster, and he said something to the effect that Napster's achievement wasn't that you could get songs for free, it was that you could decide you wanted to hear a song and you were able to hear that song pretty much instantly.

If you make your content easy to obtain legally, and if you remove the DRM handcuffs from those who do obtain content in this way, I think you'll find that a lot more people will choose to pay for it.

The trick is that a lot of this stuff is still complicated, and companies are desperately hanging on to old business models, and things are counter-intuitive to people who do buy.

For example, I don't own a Kindle. I have no real desire to own a Kindle because I'm a really slow reader and I only read one book at a time. If I'm on the bus and want to read, I'll carry that one book with me. If I go on vacation, I'll take three or four books an I won't get through all of them.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, might benefit from a Kindle, since she reads a lot, but I hate the implementation of them.

My understanding is that Kindles, when speaking from the context of Amazon DRM, only read books owned by a single account. If I buy a book on my account, and she buys a book on her account, the same Kindle can't have both books on at the same time without stripping the DRM. So you're left with three solutions:

1. Strip the DRM off the book. This is the same as piracy, from a legal perspective, though admittedly it's harder to get caught. If you're going this route, then why not just say fuck it and torrent the book from the start?

2. Buy all books under a single account, then use that same account on two Kindles. The problem with this is that people hook up and break up. If you break up, either one person loses all their books, or you "pirate" them a la Option 1. Also, if you enter a new relationship and both parties have Kindles with their own accounts, you can't reconcile the two without resorting to Option 1 and breaking the DRM.

3. Buy the book twice. This is incredibly counter-intuitive to most people who are used to sharing their physical copy of a book.

So basically what I'm saying is that there are a lot of problems with digital content that need to be resolved, but the public perspective on these industries has already shifted, and all that's left is for industry to either adapt or die. The people who pirate content when faced with an option to easily buy will always pirate that content. They will also always have the ability to pirate that content, because even after a decade of trying people are still able to easily strip DRM, and people will always be around to break and strip new forms of DRM (not to mention that DRM in general is dying because it's user-hostile and no consumer wants it). I think "the norm" will be "default buy" when content becomes easily accessible legally, but you're never going to eliminate the subset of the population that outright refuses to pay for content.