Paul Boutin has an optomistic take on where the recording industry is headed today in Salon. He theorizes that the recording industry’s futile attempts to build effective copy protection systems for music and perhaps not-so-futile attempts to legislate copy protection into everything that runs on electricity are just a sideshow . He claims that the real action is in trying to come up with a workable offering that will maintain the profitability of the industry and win customers back from piracy. His article doesn’t convince me that the recording industry (and even worse, the movie industry) isn’t dead serious about permanently forcing a bunch of restrictive crap to be included in PCs of the future. They may be coming up with alternatives to file sharing, but that doesn’t preclude them from continuing to flog Congress for nasty new legislation.