It's easy to rip a DVD, and will (in the future) will probably be easy to rip a blu-ray disc. People rip DVDs to a hard drive so they can have a video jukebox. They buy the DVD, take it home, rip it, and never take it out of the case again. Given the size of the files, sharing them is not (yet) easy. But as the last mile problem is solved, compression is improved, and p2p spreads, video file sharing will become as prevalent as audio file sharing.

The music and movie industries are dead. The publishing industry is in trouble too. The brick and mortar stores, anyway. As e-books become popular (the Kindle reader is almost Good Enough) they, too, will be shared.

"Information wants to be free" but "Entertainment wants to be paid". How to reconcile the two? How to pay the entertainers? If your latest book/album/movie/whatever will be pirated copied and provided for free as soon as it's released, how do you make a living creating? What incentive is there for you to write The Baroque Cycle when you have to actually go out and get a Real Job?

The future is the past?:
Sponsored content creators. Musicians won't just "sell out" to the man, they'll be employees. Paid by the piece. Each song an advertisement. "U-2's latest album, brought to you by Guinness." Any extra money earned via touring. No one will care about tapers (as they were called at the Dead shows of yore) as long as the tapers don't make a profit. Break even probably OK. The same for authors. This is not new. Look at the introductions to many books written in the renaissance and you see a page or more of fulsome praise for some Lord Whoever that sponsored the work.

Which works for books, which are very low cost to produce, and music, which is fairly low cost. A professional grade studio can be built fairly inexpensively in a small office. Professional grade mixing tools can be mostly done on PCs today. It will be Good Enough.

Movies, however, cost quite a bit more. The Big Budget Hollywood Blockbuster may be done. The medium budget ones (Donnie Darko and such) may be out of luck as well.

In the future, everything is a 5 minute clip on YouTube.

Some will be, or try to be, sponsored by the fans. Go here, and scroll down to "The Platinum Patron Club", to see an example.