Yesterday the Guardian carried a fairly hilarious piece on U2 manager Paul McGuinness– who claimed during a music conference in Cannes that the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley (namely Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and their hippy kinfolk) should be Public Enemy #1 in the fight against illegal music downloads. As McGuinness informs us:

“Embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music.”

Eh? Hippy slurs aside, this sounds like simply another episode of record company hand-wringing… publications like The Word magazine (see their February 2008 issue, unfortunately not available online) have more astutely (sorry Paul) captured the essential disconnect between the profit models of the industry, unstoppable technology, and the values of the music-loving public…