WARNING—Incoming long rant:

I’m not sure I have an answer to file sharing, but I know it doesn’t start with looking to China’s attempts at filtering and tracking everyone on the net or failed attempts to filter pornography in America.

Bono wants everyone’s “brown-paper packages” at the “post office” opened so his record company can tell whether or not someone’s sending a bootlegged U2 CD. Putting aside whether that’s actually feasible across the net, the presumption of it makes me want to smack him.

No single industry—entertainment or otherwise—is important enough to warrant screwing with the freedoms and economic opportunities offered by an open and neutral Internet. They’re talking about screwing with *my* life and livelyhood.

Rock stars can go busk on street corners for all I care, if the alternative is that everything I do online is monitored and tracked and locked down because I *might possibly* share music or movies with others. It’s a nasty slippery slope, and not worth the cost to protect even “nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product”.

But, the thing is, I don’t think file sharing means musicians end up on street corners. Sure, it’s a challenge to existing business models, but it’s debatable as to whether that’s a bad thing. Record companies complain about losing money, but their figures look a bit odd. Meanwhile, other artists are embracing the challenge and making careers.

I guess the closest personal experience I can offer is this: I’ve written 4 books now, and you can find them all for download via BitTorrent if you want to look. That won’t stop me from writing again, and it hasn’t stopped people from buying the books. Maybe sales have been impacted—but many downloaders are indiscriminate hoarders who never even look at what they grab anyway, so I’d’ve never gotten their cash anyway.