When you have a hammer…

I can’t help but think that recent work on compulsory licensing is a case of “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
We have a problem, to be sure. File sharing technology produced a conflict in behavior, laws and economic models, as evidenced by widespread lawbreaking and subsequent enforcement actions by those who believe that their businesses are hurt by the lawbreaking.
But we have a choice here. We can change behavior (lawsuits), change the law (compulsory licensing), or change the economic models (companies like Magnatune and direct-to-public musicmakers like Brad).
I guess it’s natural for the lawyers to want to fix things through legal means, but I think they’re solving the wrong problem. At best the legal solutions are a condescending effort to protect filesharers from themselves. The poor souls can’t be taught, and these lawsuits are so distasteful, so we’d better find a way to legalize what they’re doing. At worst, the legal solutions are a way to protect a dinosaur industry that has failed to adapt to new market conditions.
We should give new economic models a chance. Route around the old models, see if the market can come up with its own solutions. Good music is not that expensive to create. I’d bet that the largest portion of most record company budgets is for marketing and distribution, expenditures that are near-zero for Internet savvy companies.
Maybe we don’t need companies at all. Eliminate the middle man and pay artists directly. Steve Jobs thinks that even in the Internet age we still need record companies to tell us who to listen to. What an ugly sentiment. And wrong.