Following up on Sir Mick Jagger’s musings below, here’s a point -counterpoint on the digital piracy issue.

Representing the Internet-is-destroying-music argument, we have Megan McCardle. She’s free market gal, but in her current Atlantic Monthly piece “The Freeloaders” she wonders if this current industry crisis is a real turning point. Here’s the intro, click the link above to get the rest (For free! Awesome!):

It’s official: 2009 was the worst year for the record labels in a decade. So was 2008, and before that 2007 and 2006. In fact, industry revenues have been declining for the past 10 years. Digital sales are growing, but not as fast as traditional sales are falling.

Maybe that’s because illegal downloads are so easy. People have been pirating intellectual property for centuries, but it used to be a time-consuming way to generate markedly inferior copies. These days, high-quality copies are effortless. According to the Pew Internet project, people use file-sharing software more often than they do iTunes and other legal shops.

I’d like to believe, as many of my friends seem to, that this practice won’t do much harm. But even as I’ve heard over the past decade that things weren’t that bad, that the music industry was moving to a new, better business model, each year’s numbers have been worse. Maybe it’s time to admit that we may never find a way to reconcile consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid.

For the, “calm down you technophobic ninnies and/or industry shills” argument, we have the humor website Cracked.com. It recently ran a piece titled “5 Insane File Sharing Panics from Before the Internet” arguing that, dude, this is like nothing new. Sir Mick would no doubt agree.

The best part about this article? It makes you realize Mr. Rogers was a total badass:

Here’s a snippet:

Thanks to new technology and the modern lassiez-faire attitude towards intellectual property, people are bootlegging their entertainment at an unprecedented rate.

Or so the record companies would like you to believe.

The truth is that media piracy has been rampant through all of history… probably since the first guy to smear his feces on the wall in the shape of a buffalo turned around and immediately saw 50 more just like it being smeared on the walls behind him.

Here are five other historical piracy scares that make this one seem even less relevant:

#5. VCR’s Will Kill Television!

Video sharing sites like YouTube represent a schism of users: To some they’re a convenient way to share treasured memories and display and distribute the result of your new sketch comedy troupe featuring your ex-girlfriend, your roommate, your dog and absolutely no script-writing whatsoever. But the biggest controversy, of course, is the opening of the floodgates on bootleg television that may one day spell the ultimate demise of the entire broadcasting industry, if not all of life itself!

And they may well have a point: Theft is theft, and who’s going to actually pay for the programming if they can get it for free? For the first time in history, people are capable of recording and sharing video ripped straight from the very bosom of Sweet Lady Television herself, like some sort of Video Recording Device that is hitherto unprecedented in the history of- waaait a second …

Home-use VCRs were available as far back as 1963, but didn’t catch on until mass-production dropped the price in the late 1970s. In an almost unrelated note: Shortly afterwards Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, completely lost his shit.

Appearing before Congress–flecks of spittle presumably slinging from his red, swollen face and melting caustic holes into the floor–he proceeded to proclaim in all seriousness that “…the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” He then gave this stump speech that is either the most insane or the most awesome that ever happened in Congress:

“This is more than a tidal wave. It is more than an avalanche. It is here. Now, that is where the problem is…We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.”

At which point he and his men presumably led a noble but ultimately suicidal charge against the Terminator armies amassed before him. But luckily, just before Valenti set fire to a fax machine and started chanting “ATTICA!” a voice of reason spoke up, to calmly assert that not everyone who chose to own a VCR had the overthrow of America and the death of the entertainment industry in mind. A soft-spoken hero in a sweater who we like to imagine sat down to change from dress shoes to indoor sneakers before opening up a can of whoop ass.

That’s right: “Mister” Fred Rogers, a long time advocate for the VCR, gave a testimony to the Supreme Court regarding the perceived dangers of “time-shifting.” That sounds much more awesome than it actually was, bringing to mind images of Mr. Rogers displacing himself in time and fighting dinosaurs with a ray gun, but really it was just broadcasting jargon for the ability to record television shows and watch them later. Mr. Rogers’s impassioned speech turned out to be so fundamental to the close ruling (5-4 in favor of home recording) that it was quoted word for word in the footnotes. So what brought Mr. Rogers down from the neighborhood of opulence that he ruled with an iron fist? He testified in support of Betamax.

Beta-what? Exactly.

Click the link above to read the rest.