Remember the late 60s?

Remember the Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man?

Ev'rywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
But what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy London town
There's just no place for a street fighting man...

And so on. Back then, for about five minutes -- five thrilling minutes if you were young -- rock and roll itself felt like a challenge to The Man, as if it were the soundtrack to Revolution.

And in that insane, giddy, anarchic moment, stealing stuff was redefined as OK. Not just OK - romantic, counter-cultural, even revolutionary, as glorified in Abbie Hoffman's brilliantly titled book "Steal This Book."

That zeitgeist reconfigured itself, as the zeitgeist always does.

But 15 years later in the mid-80s, when the so-called digital revolution got underway, a distinct part of its ethos was also counter-cultural and utopian -- particularly as embodied in the famous phrase "Information wants to be free." That line by Stewart Brand was generally (mis)interpreted as a prescriptive exhortation -- that in the internet we finally had a blissful media anarchy where it cost nothing to read or watch or hear almost anything.

And then another 15 years after that, as the millennium was ending, the digital revolution achieved one of its apotheoses -- with the invention of so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster and Gnutella and KaZaA.

A hundred million people around the world signed up almost instantly. It was free. And once on, they could find almost any piece of popular music ever recorded and then download a copy to their computer. And play it forever, for free.

Countercultural utopia had finally arrived.

And today a large fraction of Americans – 10 percent or maybe even 20 percent -- download songs. In fact, they download literally billions of songs a year, for free.

And since these days The Man is a hepcat, even big companies are on board.

For a while Apple Computer had the right-on advertising slogan "Rip, Mix, Burn." In other words, download music (for free!) and make your own CDs.

But not everybody thinks file-sharing is cool. The companies that make and sell the CDs and DVDs that everybody is downloading for free think it's electronic shoplifting. As do a lot of the composers and performers whose music is being duplicated. Just as I might feel a little cheated if people were handing out free photocopies of the books I publish.

What finally forced me to focus on this subject is a court case: last month the recording industry trade association sent out a thousand subpoenas seeking the names and email addresses of file sharers -- regular people who download music without paying for it.

The case grabbed my attention because, first, it seemed like the real beginning of the end for promiscuous file sharing. And, second, because I’ve become a satisfied paying customer of Apple’s nifty new download music store. And third, because I happen to be the father of two teenagers who like music and who spend half their waking hours online.

So: do I think that Warner and Sony and the other record companies will actually sue millions of kids listening to illegal copies of The White Stripes and Fischerspooner? Of course not. But the litigation did make me face up to the fact that all the rampant wink-winking about free file-sharing is not really a tenable posture. It really is copyright infringement on a vast scale, and our culture depends on copyrights being honored.

The impossible dreams hatched the late-60s were abandoned pretty quickly in the 1970s. Now, here in the oughts, it's time to wake up from the impossible dreams hatched in the late-90s. As my parents never tired of telling me when I was a kid, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

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