Hirschhorn feels that content-stealing is inevitable, and that content providers should be happy to have users reading, watching, and discussing their content rather than ignoring it. Their responsibility, in turn, is to devise methods to find out who is stealing content, then brand it and advertise on it properly.

Hirschhorn may be presenting a bit of wishful thinking for his own company; SlingMedia produces devices and software that allow users to take content directly from television and upload it to computers. In his opinion, traditional media’s thinking about new media’s stealing content should evolve like this:

“ ‘You know what. These guys are cool. It’s being done anyway. Why are we trying to put the genie back in the bottle? We can’t do that. The record business tried and it was a failure. Let’s try to embrace these guys and see if we can create some new technology and a new business model.’ ”

This theory seems akin to the deals some newspaper companies have already entered with Google and Yahoo.

However, Adam Lashinsky of Fortune’s The Browser blog doesn’t agree. He calls Hirschhorn’s argument the “ ‘inevitability argument,’ almost as infuriating as the ‘promotional’ argument, namely that content creators ought to be pleased that YouTube is helping them promote their content — even if they don’t get paid for it.”

Though Lashinsky agrees that content-stealing may currently be inevitable, he thinks that problems will arise if users expect to always find content on thieving websites.

Source: The Browser blog through I Want Media