darkangel37,
This is what the music and film recording industries are up in arms about. The films are still pretty safe, as the multi-hour download time for a bootleg copy of ROTK would place a severe strain upon contemporary home broadband capacity. The music industry does have justifiable concerns in re its products – ref the Napster brouhaha.
I tried to take the time to explain the issues to my children, and I THINK they understand the issues (they did, at least, extend the courtesy of remaining awake until after the end of the discussion), but even afterwards, they get CDs from their buds with obviously bootlegged cuts.
Even with the tinkering to the legal system that has occurred over the last few years, the captains of the recording industry have their work cut out for them. With broadband access becoming ubiquitous and capacious, I fail to see an easy out. In the long run, I suspect that those companies will have to make drastic changes to their business model in order to see off this type of infringement.
Project XANADU, a hypertext scheme proposed by Ted Nelson, attempts to address this issue. The World Wide Web is a one-way static hypertext scheme, and is too simple to technically accommodate copyright issues. The Xanadu project foresaw world-wide hypertext back in the 1960s, and endeavored to create a much deeper system.
http://xanadu.com/