Bad guys emerged instantly when the home video revolution enabled mass duplication of bootleg cassettes, and later DVDs, to be sold cheaply from black market to flea market. Such centralized operations gave way, with the dawn of the internet, to a decentralized model in which individual file sharers would trade content with their friends — a much harder paradigm to monitor, van Voorn concedes.
Source: MPA Content-Protection Wing’s War Against Piracy: ‘We Will Find You and Shut Down Your Servers’