The reccord industry had pretty much the same freak out over the use of tape reccorders and tried to get them banned in the late 70's early 80's because they claimed people making copies of their tapes and reccord albums were hurting sales in a drastic way.
It's all just happening again. There's a format change for media going on and the media industry wants to be the sole controllers of the format. Not only that, they are oversaturating the movies, television, and music with music, movies, and shows that are all just copies of stuff showing very little imagination or creativity. The quality of their product is going down, therefore less people are going to buy their stuff (Hey.. lets produce 50 CD's from teenage girls who sound like Britany Spears did ! *IE...DISNEY*) And you wonder why the industry is losing so much money. They're putting tons of money into producing quantiy over quality and when they don't make their fast buck on whatever they market, they blame the downloaders. Boo Hoo !!!
I'm not defending the downloaders. I'm just showing a major reason the industry is losing cash.
btw.. it will probably cost more money to put a system in place that can detect a "illegal download" than it would to just let it continue.
What's going on is the customer base is changing and the industry is digging in it's heels trying to keep things like the old days.