Chicken Little and the recorded music crisis

For the past few years, the recorded music industry has blamed the "falloff" in CD sales on piracy and they have lobbied heavily against technologies like file-sharing and CD writers. The author is against piracy and in favor of artists being paid for their work, but before adding special-purpose restrictive hardware to everyone\´s computer, he suggests that we recognize that this is an old story. Music sales have declined in the past, and the recording industry has repeatedly blamed new technologies. But the new technologies have not gone away: the solution has always been some kind of economic bargain, and we should again expect an economic bargain to deal with the problems caused by online music distribution.