There are two issues here.
(1)
Firstly commercial pirating, where you are sold an often inferior product for a cheaper product depriving the original producer of legitimate sales.
How many legitimate sales, no one really knows.
Commercial pirating thrives because two factors: price, and availability
The lower price may allow entry into the market for people who simply cannot afford the legitimate product.
On the other side the poor quality often leads to the eventual purchase of the original.
Availability is another issue.
Current content producers are used to prescribing distribution channels and timelines for distribution, while some of those are legitimate manufacturing/Distribution contraints, some of those are designed to protect specific revenue channels/distributors.
In the world of instant gratification, the user wants a copy of the movie the moment he walks out of the cinema, not 12 weeks, or 18 weeks later at twice the market price (IE twice the price he can buy it for in a year's time).
These are fundemental business model issues which the industry has thus far failed to address.
(2) Home piracy (Hometaping, P2P)
Home piracy is a far harder nut to crack, especially because the issue of fair use comes into play.
The industry perpetually beats the drum that they hold copyright, and that you only buy the rights to use the product, yet your "Rights" to use appear (insofar as the industry is concerned) intrinsically locked into whatever fragile medium you purchased it in.
The industry tried to stop you from taping your vinyl LP's to pay in your car, even though you clearly purchased the "Right" to listen along with your LP.
The same argument is being repeated with digital media, DRM on CD's (actually they can't call them CD if they put certain kinds of DRM on them which violates the format licence), prevents you from "consuming" your legitimately purchased product in the manner in which you want to consume.
The other issue is damaged/upgraded media, if the industry goes out of it's way to prevent you from making legitmate backup copies of your cd's DVD's etc, then they should be forced to provide you with a new copy at a nominal (Materials) cost.
Coupled to this is the issue of availability, some products are simply not available to be ligitimately purchased. The product is either out of print, pressing, not available in certain markets, or being deliberately withheld from the market place (Disney is especially guility of this).
I think there needs to be some serious consumer rights reform in respect of copyright and "Right of use" before the issue of P2P can be adequately addressed.
Things I'd like to see addressed:
1. Media obsolesce, legitimate channels provided to upgrade my obsolete media at fair cost (IE cheaper than what I could do at home). (Stop the windfall profits from increasingly smaller media cycles, shame.). Failing which, a recognition that a copy (however obtained) is deemed to be legitimate.
2. Damage media replacement, legitimate channels to replace my damaged media at fair cost. Failing which, a recognition that a copy (however obtained) is deemed to be legitimate.
3. Access to product, a means of legitimising product which has not been made available by the copyright holder. (I'm thinking of a website where you can go and register your copy (of material which is unavailable at time of registration) and obtain legal use.
In part, piracy is a response to unfair practices by the producers, if those are addressed, then the semi-legitimacy of some activities would become groundless.
