I haven't read all the responses, but this thread is the usual thing, blaming the victim mostly. If consumers hadn't just almost wholesale taken a huge piss on legality and morality, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. And, if there weren't companies out there making a lot of money aiding that process, we wouldn't be having it either probably. What always happens is that people who make IP try to protect themselves against companies making huge profits off their backs, but then that action gets turned into 'the MPAA/RIAA are evil and hate us and are trying to control our lives." It's the perfect scenario for the companies like Google, Comcast, etc... who have grown immensely at the cost of IP creators. They get protected by almost everyone, because almost everyone either wants to keep stealing, or get incensed because they feel like they are somehow being controlled, most likely both. Look at the comments in so many Youtube videos that have had copyright issues. No one is upset that Google is bringing in huge numbers of eyes that they can sell for profit, because all those people want to keep getting stuff for free. And they react violently against the people who are actually getting ripped off and have both the law and morality on their side.
Honestly, if you are ripping your own legally owned movies, you have no more chance of getting in trouble than of winning the lottery. No one is going to care. This is about companies making money off the backs of IP owners, and setting precendent for the future. We all know that probably the majority of those discs out there full of movies were gotten by ripping Netflix rentals or downloads, not by legal purchases. When lots of people break the law, those of us who feel like we ought to be trusted to do the right thing suffer. It's unfortunate, but the people causing it aren't the MPAA or RIAA, it's all those folks out there who are just stealing by the truckload with zero care for the consequences. It's expensive to protect one's stuff, and if it wasn't a do or die situation, there would be no reason to do it. But it really is that bad. The music industry has suffered horribly, and the movie industry would suffer even more because it costs a lot more to make each movie.
BTW, the standard comments about the cost of DVDs and such is missing the point. The cost of the media never had much to do with it really. The cost is in the contents. The fact that there's no plastic disc involved doesn't mean that it suddenly costs half as much to make a movie or an album. The price of music has dropped dramatically since CDs were released. They haven't tracked inflation at all really, and now are lower than every because a lot of that money was going to the B&M store that no longer exists. And of course Apple now basically takes a third of the revenues of the bulk of digital sales (which you probably listen to on the high margin device they also sold you and none of which goes back into funding new musical acts), but somehow they still get treated like heros.
Anyway, I just can never quite get my head wrapped around the amount of hypocrisy and self-serving theories that always surround this issue. Yeh, it's convenient to rip movies. I do it because I donly have a player that will play off hard drive. But I realize that my convenience isn't more important than insuring the same rights that I would demand for myself if I were in their shoes. IP creators are having their rights pillaged on a wide scale, and it's not just huge multi-national companies who are suffering.
BTW, I doubt seriously that either the music or movie industries is doing this in any way to force people into a streaming model. Streaming models pay almost nothing. They couldn't begin to replace actual sales of music and movies. Every streaming service out there is basically struggling and they pay insanely small amounts to the people who make the IP that gets streamed. The music labels have tried to set up their own service to keep more of it in house, but I don't think it's really doing much better that anyone else's.
Having said that, most people would probably be quite happy with a streaming service, if they tried it. It's not like it's some kind of secret scheme being forced on people. But it suffers the same as legal sales. Why pay someone to download it when you can download it for free? The folks who are making the real money are the people who sell the bandwidth to steal it, the devices to store it after its stolen, or the advertisement dollars gained by having huge numbers of people come to see the stolen content they have available.