I'll tell you who the most bummed-out people are today, excluding those whose doors were knocked upon by FBI agents. It's not the would-be movie stealer, desperate to avoid paying $10 at the theater. It's the person who missed "American Idol" last night, or the season finale of "Lost," or the second part of a two-part "West Wing" rerun, and is now freaking out because he or she is terrified that plugging the words "Lost" and "BitTorrent" into Google will be laying out the welcome carpet for a posse of federal officers.

It should go without saying that these are the same people who'd likely be happy to cough up a few bucks if they had the ability to head over to some iTunes-like service and dial up the show they missed. If iTunes has proven anything, it is that the existence of widespread piracy points directly at a marketing opportunity. Where there is desire, there is money to be made.

Well, to all those bummed-out TV fans, all I can say is, have patience. Your day will come. Soon. Our future will be one in which everything we want will be available to us at a low enough price to seem worth paying. Because that's the only way the entertainment industry is going to survive.

This may mean that there is less money to be made overall by the big studios and the mega movie stars and the platinum pop artists. Tough noogies. Average real wages are falling in the United States, most likely as a result of intense global competition. Share the pain, folks! The same factors that make it possible for an Indian programmer in Bangalore to compete with one in Silicon Valley -- the Internet, high-bandwidth telecom lines, the easy ability to share digital information -- make it possible for entertainment consumers to gain access to whatever pleases them, quickly, cheaply and unstoppably.

It's that kind of world now. And the most stupefying part of it all is that with every bust, the entertainment industry makes it less and less likely that it will have the upper hand in how it all plays out. I asked Cory Doctorow, an up-and-coming science fiction writer who has pondered and predicted the impact of file sharing as much as anyone on the planet, how he was reacting to the most recent news. Here is his response, in full:

"The long-term solution to file-sharing must be a negotiated peace with peer-to-peer (P2P) services. ITunes is nice, but it is dwarfed by Kazaa and Grokster, et al, and it lives alongside of these services, without cannibalizing their users (in the same way that Evian co-exists with tap-water without hurting tap-water consumption).

"A P2P peace would collect money from file-sharers and disburse it to artists, based on what is being shared. The original Napster was perfect for this task, since every download went through a central server. But the studios sued Napster out of existence.

"Each successive generation of P2P since has placed a greater emphasis on attack-resistance and anonymity. The music and movie industry ultimately require a trackable, countable P2P-verse. But their lawsuits are breeding just the reverse.

"The lawsuits against BitTorrent Web sites will beget trackerless versions of BitTorrent, already in production. These are the antibiotic-resistant bacteria of P2P: the outcome of heavyhanded, ill-advised attacks on the most popular technology ever.

"There isn't any quantity of lawsuits that will convince users to give up P2P. But if the studios keep it up, they will permanently alienate their customers and drive them to seek out successively less controllable versions of P2P systems.

"It's slow, spectacular suicide."

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