MPAA losing the public battle on copyright?

Fritz Attaway of the MPAA seems to think they are losing the "public consciousness" battle on copyright.

"”The enemies of copyright have really done a good job at creating the false premise that the interest of copyright holders and the interest of society as a whole are antagonistic, and they always talk about the need for balance,” said Fritz Attaway, executive vice president and senior policy adviser for the Motion Picture Association of America. “We have got to do a better job” at attempting approaches at copyright protection “in a way that we get paid but also that consumers can access our works,” he added."

You have to admit they are very good at the PR game. He did have some positives:

"”We’ve got to do more of that. We live in an age where we cannot block access to our content,” he said. “People are going to get it one way or the other. We would like them to pay for it and we need to seek out ways where they can pay for it. But just saying ‘no’ isn’t the answer.”"

It's a real pity the RIAA didn't realise this when they put so much energy into trying to ban technologies like the Rio and p2p. If the music industry had worked with the technology industry maybe they and not Apple would be monetizing whatever the equivalent of iTunes would have turned out to be - a cheap, legitimate, open standard, clean, reliable, convenient and easy to use online music retail service.