The number of high-quality services that "compete with free" is growing—and some of the credit is certainly due to the major content conglomerates, which have made it easier to license and use their digital material. As a recent subscriber to Rdio, it's hard for me to imagine anyone who would even want to go to the hassle of pirating music when 13 million tracks are ready to be dialed up in instant, high-quality streams, complete with album art. For $4.99 a month—the cost of the Web-only unlimited subscription—you would have be one cheap bastard with way too much time on your hands to scour P2P networks instead.
Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Spotify, and iTunes are all terrific services that have been well-used in my household; we've even rented HD movies through the Xbox. All provide a much better experience than the older one of driving to a store and browsing the shelves. When done well, such services are the best way to make piracy irrelevant. We need even more of them.
Still, pirate sites remain. If rightsholders want their material removed from such sites, we think that's their decision, and that they should have basic tools to help that happen. If they choose not to use them, or to monetize their own creativity in some other way, more power to them.
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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/index.php
