Through thousands of lawsuits and hundreds of court cases, the RIAA and others in the music industry have claimed that piracy will be the death of music. They say the war they wage must be done, if only to prevent the industry from collapsing, even though that has been proved time and again to be completely false. Do the people behind it truly believe in this idea, or are they just representing the company they work for?

To get a clearer picture of what industry execs are really thinking, the former director of EMI, Per-Eirik Johansen, has come forward to give his opinion on the entire situation. Johansen, a former supporter of DRM, used to claim that these copy protection measures were necessary and the fight against pirates was crucial. Now, after leaving his post at EMI, his stance seems to have changed dramatically. While not supporting piracy, Johansen says that now a “whole generation” is violating copyrights, and that the answer is to find better solutions rather than to fight against P2P and other distribution methods.

Concerning the future of the recording industry, he had one very interesting thing to say: music as a whole has not lost anything and the future still looks promising. Instead, it is the recording industry which is suffering due to their inaction and inability to adapt their business model. You can infer that to mean he believes the RIAA and others made a huge mistake in fighting, as opposed to embracing, modern technology.