One complaint I hear a fair amount in the conversation about how to get more people to get their content through licit sources is that the word “piracy” isn’t really a fair or accurate term to describe the behavior of individuals as opposed to large-scale content theft operations. I’m not really comfortable describing individual action to get content outside of legal channels in terms that are positive, or even neutral. But I’m genuinely invested in deescalating this debate, because I think it’s the only way to forge meaningful cultural change, however square that ambition might seem. And I’d love to hear suggestions, if people have them, for language that would provoke a less negative reaction from the people we’d like to get to quit downloading content for free that they really ought to be paying for.

Over at the Technology Liberation Front, Ryan Radia has an eminently sensible post looking at the different kinds of people who circumvent copyright laws to download content, and explains why he thinks it make sense to focus on payment processing while acknowledging that we’ll never get to piracy zero:

The virtue of a “follow the money” approach to rogue websites is that it’s likely to curb piracy by users like Pirate #2, who are already willing and able to pay for legitimate content. Users who have a credit card and use it to pay for infringing content — or for services that facilitate access to infringing content — presumably have at least some disposable income to spend on expressive works. While rogue websites legislation is likely to leave many, if not most, websites that facilitate piracy unaffected, disabling U.S. payment services from doing business with a handful of especially popular offshore piracy sites will frustrate users. Many of these users will simply seek out alternatives, but some users will give up and “go legitimate.” By driving piracy further underground, such a law might cause users like Pirate #1 to spend more of their relatively worthless time seeking out infringing content. But this is the Internet we’re talking about; the determined user will find what he seeks, no matter the roadblocks lawmakers throw up.

The strongest argument against piracy is that the people downloading content outside of legal channels would never have paid for that content in the first place, and so there’s no economic harm. And the strongest counterargument to that argument is the sites that distribute content in exchange for money rather than for free. The content industries might be smart to pursue a combined approach that targets those distributors who charge for illegally downloaded content; makes it easier for consumers to get what they want at market prices in a timely manner (and makes the case to them that they’ll get better quality and customer service, including cloud portability, from legal services); and that examines international pricing models. As a new study (which I’m still digesting) points out, “Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa, the price of a CD, DVD, or copy of Microsoft Office is five to ten times higher than in the United States or Europe. Licit media goods are luxury items in most parts of the world, and licit media markets are correspondingly tiny.”

Paul Graham, the founder of start-up seeder Y Combinator has decided that the fight over SOPA and PIPA proves that Hollywood is a dying industry, and has issued calls for competitors to kill it:

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

That’s a big task, and one that comes with formidable obstacles. First, there’s the cost. Hulu’s spending about $500 million on content in 2012. That’s the total cost of making Avatar, including investments in cameras and a $150 million marketing budget. There are other companies that are spending more money, Netflix among them, but that money is going to buy up access to back catalogues as well as to original programming. But the point’s clear: it will take time for rivals to rise up who can spend as much money creating and marketing products as Hollywood does. And while there’s certainly proof that you can make fascinating, visually engaging, and financially successful movies for less than Hollywood typically does (District 9, anybody?) you’re not going to put Hollywood out of business when you’re at a huge disadvantage in terms of making product and getting consumers interested in it.

Second, and relatedly, knowing how to distribute content isn’t the same thing as knowing how to produce it, or to spot what’s good about a project, or to know how to make it work. That means that organizations like Yahoo, Netflix, and Hulu, all tech companies that are producing original content, are going to have a learning curve in producing good material. Particularly if the reason to try to kill Hollywood stems more out of a distate for SOPA than for formulaic storytelling or the lock of straight white men on the industry in a way that limits storytelling. And they’re going to have to figure out how to get customers to consume it regularly without the predictability of a movie release calendar or a network. These challenges aren’t impossible to overcome, but they are a hurdle.

Third, I don’t know that there’s good evidence that there will be a direct tradeoff between movie spending and other forms of entertaining. Video game sales are outstripping movie tickets, but it’s not like movie ticket sales have declined in relation to the rise of video games: in fact, both industries have experienced a similar downturn in the recession. And certainly, video game creators have an interest in Hollywood surviving as a way to spin off games into movies that help extend and make more durable existing franchises. There may be new forms of entertainment in 50 years, but I’m not sure it’s going to entirely replace movies or television, both of which have proven to be durable art forms even as our ways of consuming them change, posing both distribution and storytelling challenges. I don’t doubt that we’ll get new and exciting forms of entertainment. But I don’t think we’ll have to kill Hollywood to get them.

What could have been a tense session at Sundance yesterday in the wake of the failures of SOPA and PIPA to advance, turned into a generally genial conversation between MPAA President Chris Dodd, National Association of Theater Owners president John Fithian, and filmmaker Christine Vachon, with occasional tough interjections from moderator and New York Times reporter David Carr.

“My take is that your industry vastly underestimated the intimacy and closeness of the relationships between tech companies and the consumer,” Carr told Dodd. “The people we want re-engineering the Internet are not your people or your old people.”

Dodd acknowledged that the protests against SOPA had been “a watershed event,” and said that the conversation would continue about legislation to address the problem of overseas sites that distribute pirated content. But he generally pivoted towards talking about the need for technology and content providers to recognize their common interests rather than dwelling on their differences. He pointed out that the same consumers who want content available on a wide array of devices are also the consumers who go to movies in theaters most frequently. “The person who loves technology loves content,” Dodd said. “They’re not the enemy of this industry at all. They’re the future in many ways.” He and Fithian also both emphasized the need to give consumers more choices in theaters.

“The screens in the film world got dominated by big pictures,” Fithian acknowledged. “We don’t need Harry Potter playing on 6 screens in our megaplexes. Maybe 4. And maybe we can pick up some independent movies.” He pointed to Open Road, the distribution company owned by AMC and Regal Cinemas as proof of the theaters’ intentions to begin acquiring independent movies and acting as distributors themselves. And Fithian said that the move towards digital projection will dramatically lower the cost of getting a movie in theaters from $1,000 per print to $100 for digital copies. In a reversal from prior approaches, Fithian suggested that NATO might reconsider offering Video On Demand sales in theaters so consumers could immediately get multi-device-capable copies of movies they’d just enjoyed.

And Vachon, who is at Sundance promoting her LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, which I’ll see on Wednesday emphasized that just as the MPAA and NATO are changing their approaches, so are filmmakers. “I think theatrical exhibition as the only means of measuring the success of a movie is changing, and fairly rapidly,” she said. “We are experimenting as much as we can with length, with format. We’ve always experimented with content…Our budgets have come down drastically, but the methodology of making a movie…that hasn’t come down…the creative margin is what has to be reconciled and reworked…we are constantly looking at different kinds of different distribution, ways we can directly market our work to the consumer.”

It’s been a big couple of days on the international copyright-enforcement front, as Lamar Smith put SOPA on hold, Harry Reid postponed the vote originally scheduled for next week on the Protect IP act, and the federal government shut down Megaupload, prompting a wave of Anonymous attacks. Over at the Technology Liberation Front, Jerry Brito makes a point that I think ties all of these moves together (though his conclusion ultimately goes in a somewhat different direction). He writes: “The Megaupload folks are not the most sympathetic defendants, to say the least. They likely knew very well they were profiting from piracy, and they probably induced it as well. Anonymous’s attacks in retaliation for the arrests and domain seizures, therefore, threaten to destroy the good will the Internet community generated the previous day with the SOPA protests.”

As Brito points out, the Megaupload move proves that the federal government already has quite a bit of power when it comes to shutting down sites that are intentionally profiting off the distribution of copyrighted material for free. But I’d also be curious to hear if there are strong solutions companies could be using to detect pirated material before users are able to distribute it. I know that scanning every upload would be incredibly burdensome. But if there was some way to crawl enough material to act as a deterrent, and to give tech companies a way to both ban offenders and report them to appropriate government agencies, that seems like something the tech community might want to look into developing if it hasn’t deployed it already. I have no idea if that’s possible — my screener copies of things tend to have a number imprinted on the image that would be an immediate red flag. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of enforcement beyond U.S. borders. And it would be hard to get an overall consensus to adopt such techniques — someone’s probably always going to consider it worth the risk to keep distributing pirated material. But it would be a way for the tech community to go a step beyond the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which requires creators to give notice that their work is being ripped off, and to stand in clear solidarity with artists — and also demonstrate that the tech community can handle problems without government intervention.