What artists and moviemakers could do is, sell the right to see contents before others. Assuming that DRM is cracked and leaked after some time and will inevitably fall into the "public domain", users would not buy "a song" or "a movie", but the lifestyle of watching it directly out from the factory, while others would have to wait until it's cracked.
When the season 2, 3 and 4 of Arrow aren't available in Europe, we know that Netflix isn't selling the lifestyle of being up-to-date with fashion.
They'd work on commission. They'd work on crowd-funded commission. If you want a movie made, you pay for it yourself. If you want to watch a movie that's already been made, why shouldn't that be free? The work has already been done and paid for.
The work has already been done and paid for, after all.
Personally I disagree, I don't think the current model is so broken that it can't be fixed. Although some things about it are just plain dumb. The primary part that is almost comical in this case is the bit where content owners refuse to make the extra money that they could so easily make by selling/renting to the millions of people that want to pay them and instead spend a fortune on "public relations" and copyright trolling.
Digital files have none of these.
The rationalization here was that the work was already done, so why shouldn't it be free?
It's a silly rationalization and I'm pointing that out.
You'll need to add yet another caveat to your original claim to make it work.
The fact that the business landscape wouldn't tolerate this as a legitimate method is a failure of ego and imagination, not something inherent to the system.
If you have a point, you need to find a better way of making it.
If anything, this should push production houses to work better with rights distribution. In India, that's already happening with "Premier" channels which run seasons alongside US counterparts. For shows that appear on now Premier channels, I have not torrented a single one. I am also sure that if not for rampant torrenting, this would have never happened.
Internet is a great leveller. Take a deep breath, let it in. By the time we all have gray hair, this will be long sorted out. You can't lock down IP by country in 2016. If you built a system that loses money if it leaks internationally, it's your fault. Next, try to build a business model that has more chances of survival than chances of sand retaining in your fist.
The real problem is that people still expect a century old business model to work. If it doesn't, they lose their minds.
If a tree falls in another part of the world, and nobody saw it, nobody visited that forest for 10 years, nobody wanted to use that wood, did it really fall? Did American oak planters lose money because of it?