What lesson? With the consildation of youtube and twitter and them now being the arbiters (with a nice backdoor to rights holders) they won.

Early on (15-25 years ago) they didn't really have streaming or digitally deliverable product (pre itunes) and instead hauled people off to court for consuming music in any way that wasn't a pile of $20 plastic discs bought at the local megamall.

Instead of reasonable digital streaming solutions groups like the MPAA made things like the DIVX format which were disposable discs that expired. The commercial DVDs had long unskippable copyright warnings and unskippable ads, an inability to play the content on linux or other open source players, etc.

Then there was the DeCSS fiasco; there was a master encryption key that they called their private IP and used legislation called the DMCA to enforce it. 2600 magazine, a monthly alternative culture computing magazine, published the key and were sued by universal studios, paramount pictures, metro-goldwyn-mayer, tristar pictures, columbia pictures, time warner entertainment company, disney enterprises, and twentieth century fox, for printing a number (https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/04/2600_withdraws_suprem...)

These organizations eventually learned the lessons and won, so you are correct. but it was years of bogus outlandish lawsuits (suing old ladies for millions, sometimes because neighbors used their unprotected WiFi - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_...), technology fiascoes and incredulous legislation that made them the laughing stock of the world before they got their act together.

There was a time in the mid 2000s when ignoring copyright was the sensible and reasonable moral action given the outrageous "sue everybody without regrets" strategy of the RIAA.

Lessons

1. Offer products to your customers in ways they want to consume them.

2. Don't criminalize your customers for your lack of doing #1