Recently a fifth RIAA lawyer was added to the U.S Justice Department despite the objections of public interest groups, trade pacts and library coalitions.

This would be the RIAA celebrating the fact a federal appeals court has barred a live webcast of the ongoing Joel Tenenbaum trial in a victory for repressing information. After all, if you’ve sued 30,000 people without managing to make the slightest dent in society, then you might be a little embarrased by the public seeing your claims in court.

So here’s the money-saving, music industry-saving answer:

Stop hiring lawyers, and instead start hiring prominent P2P users to implement solutions based on common sense rather than legality and protectionism.

Sounds like madness?

Since the four defendants were found guilty in the The Pirate Bay trial, membership of Sweden’s Pirate Party has shot up – including 3000 new members in the first few hours after the decision.

Over 100,000 people have already signed up, pre-launch, for IPredator, the Pirate Bay’s new service to hide IP addresses from authorities, with the Pirate Bay not logging any data to avoid having anything to turn over to authorities.

A new study from Norway has shown illegal file sharers are more likely to buy music from legitimate sources than other web users.

Not only that, but the illegal file sharers buy 10 times more music than other web users, using iTunes and Amazon.

And this echoes a study by the Canadian Record Industry Association in 2006, with three out of four file sharers buying tracks they’d previously downloaded illegally.

Quoting selectively from Umair Haque on his Harvard Business School blog:

‘No business has a right to profit, sell, or even to produce. All are privileges that society grants businesses.’

‘every time the music industry kills an underground distribution channel, a more efficient one arises in its place. Goodbye mixtapes, hello www. Bye www, hello Napster. Bye Napster, hi BitTorrent. Bye BitTorrent, hi anonymous, ciphered, totally decentralized p2p nets.’

‘Why? By limiting the supply of interaction, the music industry is only ensuring that each interaction becomes more and more efficient. The endgame is a distribution system where every song in the world in the world can be zapped invisibly and anonymously from me to you in a nanosecond.

The point? 21st century economics are radically decentralized. Wars against networks are unwinnable — when orthodox organizations are the ones fighting them. Only networks (or markets and communities, if you’re a long-time reader) can fight other networks.

Want a better music/media/etc. “business model”? The understanding that hierarchies are dominated by networks is the key — and the failure to understand it is exactly why the media industry is so deeply in decay.’