Dan Glickman, head of the MPAA , was recently interviewed by eWeek, part of "a deliberate effort to talk to more tech folks more frequently."

He noted:

[T]he tech world and the, I hate to use the word 'content,' world, because we're all kind of in this together—these two worlds are worlds that have to work together. What I've noticed in Washington over the past 10 or 15 years is that every issue that's worked on becomes Armageddon here, and I want to try and keep these issues as much as possible from becoming another Armageddon type of thing.

The Armegeddon syndrome is indeed a real problem. When one talks to the business types in either the tech or the content industries, one gets sober discussions of the interdependence between the two. But once something is turned over to the litigators -- as in Grokster -- the sides harden, and no weaknesses can be made admitted lest they "hurt the case." It becomes a scorpions in a bottle situation.

Glickman is well aware of the complexities and interdependencies, and that is unequivocally good:

[W]e have to recognize that creative juices are largely fed through some form of compensation. That is that while, yeah, some people do create out of the goodness of their heart, it defies the laws of human nature to think that people are going to come up with new ideas—whether it's movies, music, books, software or other inventions just because it's a sweet and wonderful thing to do. That's that side of the coin.

The other side of the coin is that technology is changing so rapidly and consumers' desires for new products are changing so rapidly that it's harder and harder to fit an old model into this new distribution system that we've got.

On the other hand, I went to the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and I saw all this amazing stuff. [The fact that] all these new things had movies—they're running things that we have created—on there shows that it's a little bit like the old song, 'Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage—you can't have one without the other.' It's going to get trickier and trickier to try and figure out how to compensate artists and creators in this new world.

PFF is firmly on all sides of these disputes. Content absolutely must be protected, and so must technological innovation. (When we work out the details, we'll let you know.)