Former RIAA president Hilary Rosen finally gets it about copyright.

This volume needs to be embraced and managed becasue it cannot be vanquished. And a tone must be set that allows future innovation to stimulate negotiation and not just confrontation.

Her column at the Huffington Post (she apparently chose not to take feedback on it) is filled with honesty about both the tech and copyright industries, honesty she never admitted to (in my memory) while shilling for the RIAA.

But is it possible that this honesty is what finally caused her to leave? (Or did her life, and its imperatives for action, take precedence?)

That would be a shame, because the fact is, as she writes, that the answers here must lie in the market, not the law courts. For every step the copyright industries take in court, technologists take two steps away from them. This will continue until the copyright industries really engage consumers with offerings that are worth what they charge, and which aren't burdened with DRMs that restrict fair use.

I had a little experience with this over the weekend. While driving home from Texas I decided I would like to listen to an opera which I didn't have on CD. So I pulled out my laptop, fired up iTunes, and tried to copy it over to disks. But my favorite song from that opera had already been copied to another disk, and my initial attempt to copy it failed as a result.

Along the way I found several problems with the iTunes software unrelated to DRM:

1. It's single-user. People can't rate songs separately.
2. Songs are difficult to put in "track" order, as they appear on a regular CD. This is a real pain for opera lovers.
3. Equalizing the volume of songs so you're not constantly fiddling with the volume controls is non-obvious.

Oh, some of these faults may be fixed in Version 4.8, but like many users I've seen so many "upgrades" that are actually downgrades of digital rights that I'm reluctant to approve the load.

My point here isn't to knock Apple. These are disputes between a customer and a vendor. The problem is that the industry remains unwilling to open up their vaults and allow this competition to commence -- also that the technology tends to "lock-in" users, making it harder-and-harder for them to switch over time.

Hilary Rosen can, if she chooses, be a force for creating compromise here, for ending the copyright wars, no matter how the Grokster case turns out.

The question is whether she will do something or just bemoan the situation.

We'll watch and report.