John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder: I am still optimistic. I didn't expect that the entire wealth of the industrial period would gracefully allow us to render them irrelevant. They're putting up a spirited fight, but I don't think they'll win. Victory comes to the patient. The content industry used to call me the devil, now the same people come to me for advice on how to make it work for them, they're abandoning their King Canute strategy. I don't think there's proof that downloading has cost the record industry billions, for the same reason that hearing a song on the radio doesn't cost a sale. There are lots of studies, but no one can say for sure. Last year I asked Cary Sherman if he'd co-design a study with EFF to give fair insight into what the losses or gains are from downloading. He said, "I don't think we can do that. I don't believe my constituents would allow that because it might turn out that you're right." Wouldn't they want to know? "No, I don't think it's like that with them." It's a matter of religious belief. They're near retirement, they can have any religion they want. They'll be replaced by the electronic Hisbollah they've created with their Draconian strategies, the wild-eyed 17-year-olds who hack DRM will beat the 55 year olds in posh cars in Bel Air.

Can we come up with a regime for regulating the economy of ideas and the way of getting paid for work you do with your mind that doesn't treat thought as a noun and therefore subject to being treated as property. The IP system is a gigantic kludge of patches that have been laid on in different regimes, as it all goes to bits, it needs to be harmonized with a regime that recognizes that this regulates the relationship of the creator and the audience.

At a Washington, DC, tech conference last week, RIAA boss Cary Sherman suggested that Internet filtering was a super idea but that he saw no reason to mandate it. Turns out that was only part of the story, though; Sherman's a sharp guy, and he's fully aware that filtering will prompt an encryption arms race that is going to be impossible to win... unless users somehow install the filtering software on their home PCs or equipment.

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But who would voluntarily install software that would continually scan incoming P2P streams for copyrighted material after that material has been decrypted? Or software that would watch every song you played and tried to figure out if it was legit?

Sherman knows it's a tough sell. "Why would somebody put that on their machine?" he asked rhetorically. "They wouldn't likely want to do that."

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What's most incredible about all of this is that the RIAA and some ISPs (namely AT&T) are seriously moving ahead with a filtering regime despite their own admissions that it won't work. Filters might work, they might allow for fair use, and they could conceivably be built in such a way as to maintain privacy, but it just wouldn't matter. Filtering as a concept is ultimately doomed by encryption unless the "filters" simply block entire protocols altogether, and talking about the consumer benefits of installing RIAA-approved filtering software is just another sign of how ludicrous the entire debate has become.