By contrast, Creative Commons is a copyright reform movement that acknowledges this cultural swirl. It lets artists strike their own balance between how tightly they want to clutch their work, and how liberally they want to spread it.

Today, a lot of the Web’s content — writing, pictures, music, video — is available under Creative Commons licences. This broader concept of ‘copyleft’ is not about denying authors their due, but finding a model that recognises and compensates them, without letting an overweening industry pull the shots.

Which is not to claim that there’s a big revolution brewing. The Web is a mixed economy of those who sell and those who give away. It’s not a vast dotcommunist utopia, nor the fief of a few Fortune 500 companies. The commercial Web coexists comfortably with the tribal potlatch of peer-to-peer collaboration.

Like Radiohead’s story illustrated, the freely circulated album only spurred music lovers to go buy the CD. But the music industry ignores this seismic shift to its own peril. Head-in-the-sand measures, like the Digital Rights Management (DRM) software to curb piracy, alienate legitimate consumers by treating them like potential criminals. This year Prince, Paul McCartney and Madonna have all sidestepped the big labels in different ways. Reinvent or die — those are the stark alternatives the entertainment industry is faced with. Because like it or not, the Internet is taking us into a new era of creative production and circulation. In other words, something’s gotta give.

amulya.gopalakrishnan@gmail.com