The piracy debate always kills me. Regardless of anyone's view on the moral implications, the behaviour is here to stay. I'm not sure I've ever heard of a campaign asking people to collectively take responsibility for their moral behaviour work for very long, if at all.
Enforcement has been tried and has failed for the most part.
This. The ethical debate is important in some cases -- I feel totally justified, for example, in grabbing a torrent of
1963 since it will never be collected -- but it's not relevant to the question of how to fight piracy.
DRM doesn't work, lawsuits don't work, giving users an easily-accessible, reasonably-priced digital download works. At least, as well as anything possibly can.
I've often commented that the TV networks could trivially implemented a service that works like
sabnzbd only more reliably and with the capability of taking the word "the" off the front of filenames, but they won't. Instead they're trying to cling to cable while rolling alternatives like Hulu out as slowly and conservatively as possible.
The most important solution to comic-book piracy is one that DC and Marvel are already working on: STOP CHARGING $4 PER BOOK.
The reality is that we may simply face a world where the market's going rate for some forms of artwork is not enough to sustain production and that no one really has a perfect solution to that yet.
I wouldn't say "some forms" so much as "some types". TV's not going to go away, but we're going to see much smaller budgets for TV shows.
Comics -- well, the current form of single-issue distribution at specialty shops may very well go away, though I don't expect it'll happen in this decade. But distribution in bookstores is huge, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface of digital distribution.
But I can tell you that when the options are "Wait patiently, save up, and make judicious spending choices" versus "press a button and receive all that your heart desires", anyone expecting the former to win is an idiot.
Indeed, but "charge a low price for an easy download" fits under the latter category pretty well.