It's true what R.CDN.Soldier said about free advertisement. It's not like the clips on YouTube & other web sites are anywhere near DVD or Blueray quality and since most people don't have a clue as to how you can rip/download the videos straight off the sites in order to store them on your system, their concern over this situation is a bit stupid.
How much more exposure would one have for their work if they just continued to try and market/sell themselves & their product just around their local community or in certain areas of their country, compared to being posted on the internet for anybody with an internet access can view your work?
For the amount of people who might copy your work onto their systems and give you nothing in return, that's generally countered greatly by the amount of people you would actually reach around the world who would be actually interested in your work and willing to order the full-quality, physical form of your work, ala a delivered DVD/BlueRay, or direct download of the full quality file.
All this is, is another example of people getting too damn greedy and expecting to hold an entire monopoly over the market. They don't see the bigger picture of how the internet is actually helping them gain more fame, more attention & more money..... they can only focus on the small group of people world-wide who they're not getting money from and trying to find a way to get that money...... and will end up shooting themselves in the foot by further attempting to restrict the medium so that it'll work just like the 1970's..... limited and isolated to certain areas and certain people they can afford to market to, rather then letting it just unfold and do it's thing.
Just think..... if Justin Bieber didn't use YouTube and tried to copyright & control everything he put out.... we wouldn't have his sorry arse annoying us today at the extent it is.
That'd probably be a good thing in my view..... but it also shows the point I am trying to make about just how powerful the internet is as a mass-advertisment medium.
If you try to restrict the system anymore then it currently is, then don't expect people to be making the millions they are today from it.
I'd have no problem losing a bit of profit from people snagging my work off the net..... it's a minor expense compared to the level of exposure my work would get to an audience that would normally never see or hear of myself or my work.
Added:
They couldn't control people stealing/pirating movies & music when Cassettes, VHS, CD's & DVD's came out.... they still can't control those things today..... what makes them think they'll even make a dent on the internet?
For every action they try to make, there will be dozens of counter-actions created to make those original actions meaningless.
Take Adobe for example. When their programs first came out there wasn't much security preventing their files from being copied and used by others who didn't pay for it. Then Security Key's came along to confine the copy to the one user who had the proper serial numbers....... then along came key generators..... so they added an additional activation registry system after the serial key is entered...... then activation generators, cracks and de-activators for the activator came along..... then came continued online updates & checkers to your adobe products as they loaded on your system to continue to determine if you have a legit copy, which would lock you out if it wasn't..... then came cracks and procedures to make your computer disconnect Adobe programs from their online updates & checks to allow you to avoid this process and keep using the illegal copy.
Other companies have included "Dongle Keys" that won't let the program run on your system unless you have a dongle key plugged into your computer designed specifically for that program..... and people created programs or files to mask themselves as a legit dongle key, by-passing this security feature.
And I'm sure they and other companies like them will come up with new security features and procedures to try and prevent illegal copying of their programs & files...... but as always, someone will come along and figure out how to counter it.
When the Adobe Activation things came along, many people thought that was the end of pirating and the hackers/crackers were finally beaten.
This redundant process is about as effective as the War on Drugs.