Well, the easiest way to stop piracy would be to release movies in a DRM free format at a reasonable price.

Bit Torrent is only free if your time has no value. I'd buy stuff off of iTunes but not being able to burn it is just too unreasonable.
Accept piracy from the young as an advertising venue to keep them interested in your medium. You can't get money from them because they have no money. But you'll get it from them when they are older and too busy to deal with BT.

They can make a basket of money selling us HD versions now, and in years start selling even higher res, better sound etc...sell us the whole catalog over again.

Then of course can just create content whenever they want to, so how about increasing income by producing more, better shows...

Why don't you think this is for DRM, otherwise it seems too evil, even for Apple. I think they are plugging the analog hole to be able to download and play HD video over a protected path. Think Apple HDMI cables.

Clearly theres a method to Steve's madness, there always is. Most of the complaints here are record company mandates. He needs to do this to get what he wants from the studios, full HD video running out an iPod.

This also explains why AppleTV was released as HDMI only.