I think for most of us we have gone past the issues with semantics, that file sharing is no the same as stealing.
What I am more intersted in is how can content producers be fairly rewarded in this new world and what the future of content production looks like if there is less money for producers. Technology destroying some of the middle men should make producers more even with a smaller pie, which will help a bit.
File sharing has been around a long time and yet it still seems more quality content than ever is being produced, maybe the incentives are less of a problem than I think.
I think the problem is one of momentum. In any given timeframe, only x% of movies/tv productions/music albums/whatever is expected to make y% of the money. I would assume that the people who do the sums on this thing have the numbers nailed down pretty well, but every now and then a Star Wars or a Michael Jackson comes along and you get an outlier which injects a lot of capital into the industry.
So the numbers would be declining, but it's hard to know if this is specifically from file sharing, or just from an audience not engaged with a specific product. But the content investors don't know any other game, so they keep investing. It might take ten years of no big hits, no outliers before they decide the game has permanently changed.
And besides, maybe the ROI is so good that it can take a 50% cut and still be better than anything else they can easily get involved in.
When big industries peter out, it's usually not evident until hindsight has been introduced what was the point where it was no longer worth committing any capital. There is a lot of momentum pushing them along, particularly in very established demographics.
Eventually either a new way of earning cash from production will pop up, or, more likely, the returns to investors in entertainment will head back to the levels experienced by many other industries. The barriers to entry for new talent will be lower (less gatekeepers) but the overall outsized returns to a small number of individuals will probably permanently lower. Because it's hard to dominate an industry and make massive returns without structural, legislative or oligopolistic barriers to entry to competition.
I guess what remains to be seen, is that if outsized returns are off the table, whether you will still see big budget stuff that pushes the industry forward.
With something like Game Of Thrones you can see the results of a much bigger budget compared to things like Rome and Merlin. The new push towards virtual sets might be able to bridge the quality gap between the real big budget productions and lower budget content at the moment.
I doubt it will ever come to the point where high risk high reward big productions won't happen. It might happen a bit more rarely if the perceived risk goes up, but by doing so, the value of big productions goes up because so few are doing them, and you get a nice circular chain of events.
