FCUK the citizens
The pendulum swings back and forward between the liberal and the authoritarian. When society is controlled by the mob (eg the Communist revolution, Hitler directed mob rule or consumerism) authoritarianism rules, because most people are only happy if some evil bastard ruler is grinding his boot down on the faces of those who look funny or think differently or don't conform to a 'train on the rails' type aherence to social laws.
Now we see full swing into authoritarianism. In the 60s and 70s music was the realm of the poet and the protester, the freedom fighter and free lover, drugs experimenter and free thinker. Now it is the land of conformism where artists are criticised for having their own ideas and the non-conformists of the world are expected to toe the line and give up on any belief that maybe the governments and the corporations don't know best. Even brash young web journals like El Reg pander to the idea that anyone who thinks different is an idiot (the word "freetard" is the kind of newspeak b*llshit term Big Brother would be proud of).
The real reason that music piracy has become such a problem has nothing to do with freetard; it's actually because the establisment is looking for new ideas in all the wrong places. Get a bunch of conformist politicians, money obsessed music insiders and journalist hacks together and you have the creative problem solving ability of a bunch of monkeys locked in a small shed. The same answer comes up time and time again: protect the existing system by whatever means necessary.
If you want my opinion, the best way of solving this problem is to do for all music what Radiohead did - offer medium quality downloads of all music on a pay-what-you want pricing strucure, then offer a fixed-cost top-quality download. The governments should then set up a universal P2P site that everyone can upload their music to free of charge. This way, consumer will pay more for music they like and less for music that isn't so good (which the current consumer is unable to do) and so the market will become more competitive. Musicians will be freed from the creativity-limiting dependence on big corporations and music communities will spring up to help spread news of new music, which will create a true driving force for innovation.
As Radiohead showed (and as basic economics predicts) people who want to pay £4 for a new album will pay £4 for it if they are given the chance. More money is spent if a sliding scale of pricing is available than if the choice is between paying either £8 plus for the album legally or £0 for it from illegal P2P. Create a much more free system and not only will costs be driven down, but the profit to the artists and the musicians will increase AND quality will go up. The amount of music made available at an affordable price to consumers will increase tenfold overnight without losing impoverished bands like Metallica a penny. Its a win-win-win situation, and the only losers from this more competitive and more creative new system will be those who put the least creativity into the current system, ie the big music executives.
The problem is that the only people who can stop this happening are also those who have nothing to gain from this new system, and the people in charge of coming up with alternative ideas are exactly the same type of people who allowed our current big industry disaster of the credit crunch to happen. So, we'll be left with an inferior and costly re-hash of the old system that fails to take advantage of the new technology and makes lots of people into criminals.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
