Nothing stopped Napster when the .mp3 revolution happened, but despite that clear, recent and grim (for the music industry) example, most of them haven't modified their business practices still separating production and distribution, with international distribution deals having to be decided country by country.
But Napster, etc. worked for a while because it was free and easy... and breaking the law to get free music you wanted didn't seem to have any negative consequence. Embracing a model where original artistic content should be given away for free is not a model on which a business can thrive. If there's no money in some endeavor, not too many people want to participate in it.
If Napster had stuck, the motivation to try to make money by being a professional musician would have probably waned. It's a lot of work that is done on hopes of a lot of reward (...usually "someday"). If there is no chance of a "someday", those people might decide to pursue some other career. Play it out and you get very little professionally-produced music.
The Video business is even worse. Even if all of the net a musician could make from CD and/or iTunes tracks is lost in "overhead", they can still tour and make some money by performing. In the movie & TV business, that's not as easy to replicate. For example, if an A-lister is paid $20M to star in a blockbuster movie, it would be hard to replace that $20M doing live performance dinner theater or similar.
If a Napster-like event is allowed to fully attack the business model of Hollywood, "we" may feel like we're winning for a while (free movies & TV) until the well runs dry on
new movies & TV creations. That's where it goes when original creativity is allowed to be marginalized away to being worthless... or worth little. The broad motivation to keep cranking out high quality stuff like movies & TV that we enjoy goes away when the money goes away.
As previously mentioned, there is a ton of free video added to YouTube every day. It is already available for free download via Internet. If one craves cheaply produced, free video creations, that's what it looks like. But what "we" want is the high quality production, well-written stories, blockbuster special effects, well directed presentations, with highly-talented actors... all of which (all those people named in the credits at the end of the show) want to be paid to do the work they do... just like "we" want to be paid to do whatever work we do.
It's easy to make the consumer argument until you put yourself in their shoes. Then, it becomes an argument of continuing to do the work you do for a lot less compensation. No matter what our jobs actually are, how often do we embrace that proposition with open arms?
TV for these very purposes).
