Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I'm curious as to the technical details. I'm sure it'll work this time. "For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online" Hrmph. Citation required. Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside: * The DMCA already…
> * Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well. What's ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained tracti…
Having more than one streaming service isn't a big problem, assuming they're priced reasonably. Going from one service with everything for $15 to ten services with a tenth of everything for $15 each isn't really that, but that's not the root of it.
Their problem is that people are going to want a single interface to view everything through. If you actually subscribe to three different services, you want to turn on your TV and see everything available to you.
The companies in the best position to do this are the likes of Google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft. Hollywood isn't too stupid to realize the dangers of that, but they're missing the obvious solution to it.
Publish a standard streaming API, so that anybody can make a streaming client, the same as anybody could make a VCR. Then the dominant consumer of the API won't be a big monopolistic corporation that will then be able to use its power against the movie producers, it will be a zillion different companies selling dirt cheap HDMI dongles with WiFi who each individually has no power at all. They'll all end up running whatever open source software somebody publishes to consolidate all the different services into one interface, which Hollywood could then improve themselves the same as any other open source project. It competitively atomizes a third party middle man that they don't want.
But it's basically the opposite of DRM. Security through clarity -- make everything open so nobody powerful can insert themselves between you and the viewer. Because big tech companies are more of a threat to them than The Pirate Bay. And they have to realize that before they're willing to do it.