Copyrights and your freedom

See this NY Times story regarding a new law suit brought against Sony BMG by the Electronics Frontier Foundation.

Although it seems that EFF won this battle, the future won't be as bright as one may have thought. The reality is that the record and movie industry will eventually force everybody to agree on something before sell you any Disc, no matter what's on there. As a consumer, the only choice you may face is not buying (and not listening, watching, etc). This would mean higher cost for distribution and eventually fewer artists will be able to have them heard or watched for that matter.

The solution? Probably the increase of independent produced records/movies? I'm not so sure about that. How many shareware programmers make a decent living on shareware?