I have to say this again; the "media industry" has not FAILED to extract money from people. The #1 show may be represented better by BitTorrent however -- rather than what shows people can watch based on a subscriber package, so that the allocation of funds for content providers may be very wrong.
But people spend what they can afford to spend on entertainment -- and they don't spend more than that in most cases.
There are a lot of poor people barely scraping by right now -- and you are not going to get them to pay $80 a month for a cable package. You are not going to get $14 for a DVD. For people with money, they just settle for shelling out money and don't worry about it.
If the entertainment industry wants to get a larger share of money - they can tax the supermarkets and drug companies -- because people are spending money on food and medicine instead of $14 DVDs.
Maybe genetic engineering can produce a turnip that has actual blood in it, but the entertainment PROVIDERS damn well knows the truth -- they just don't want to distribute the money to content CREATORS in an equitable manner.
And the Job Creators don't want to waste their profits on hiring Americans -- so there won't be an increase in entertainment spending. This should be a no brainer.
>> Honestly, the Government might as well spend money on free entertainment rather than the NSA --- because if they actually do stop all piracy, then people who have nothing to do will probably start getting politically active and protesting. Maybe they'll even vote. That would really fuck things up for the bread and circuses department.