The end of 'free' digital content looms nearer than thought

The one day Wikipedia blackout made the otherwise obscure SOPA and PIPA bills of the USA Congress get global limelight. Those bills aimed at ensuring that sites which hosted pirated content, would have to comply with content owner's take down notices, and risk being stripped of their payment gateways/advertising networks if found to be 'persistent defaulters'. This lead to a Silicon Valley vs Hollywood media battle, which Silicon Valley seemed to have won due to the deferral of the bills. But that win was a Pyrrhic victory as the post below would show. In my Apr11 post(  http://financeandcapitalmarkets.blogspot.in/2011/04/why-end-of-free-content-looms-aheadand.html), I had predicted that downloading pirated content would be more difficult. But recent events have accelerated the rate of change

1. After the megaupload owner was arrested without bail in New Zealand, websites like filesonic panicked and have restricted the download facility to only the person who posted the links! In essence, they changed the business model from filesharing to file storage. While sites like mediafire etc are bravely going on, it is tougher to access pirated content, especially the legacy ones.
2. Content owners are shifting towards the idea of a central content repository, against which filehosting/sharing sites can ensure that uploaded content can be screened to check for piracy. If that materializes,most advertising dependent sites will find it difficult to avoid compliance with that. 
3. Youtube now screens uploaded content for digital footprint of copyrighted content, and then gives the rights owner the choice of profiting from that(by showing ads before/during viewing those videos) and explictly tags who owns the content. That makes the content piracy more difficult. 
4. Thanks to the telecom scam in India, hard landing fears in China and other emerging economies, capex on telecom/broadband is reducing and therefore the ease of piracy(always on high speed broadbands DO make it faster to access that content) falls.

 As I'd suggested in that post, free content seems the only way out, and to ensure Wikipedia like commons grow, we should prime the well by giving back to those commons.