The middle ground probably involves drawing a line at commercial exploitation of the work. If you want to see a movie in the theatre - some of the money you're paying should go to the studio. If you don't feel like seeking out p2p software, curating your own music collection, and independently supporting the artists to your satisfaction - some of that music-store money should go to the artist. One shouldn't find commercial streaming sites charging money and then not compensating the creator.
But note that PG's essay mostly comes from pragmatism, and what I've described is similar to the way things are today. It's a hard fact that copyright enforcement on individuals is fundamentally incompatible with universal computation and ubiquitous Internet. I, for one, am much more worried about the Internet dying out (where "Internet" implies common adherence to the seminal End-to-End principle), than politicians suddenly deciding to legislate away the studios' box office revenue. As such, I will continue to oppose copyright in a non-nuanced manner, and work on Internet-preserving software.
If you want to see a movie in the theatre - some of the money you're paying should go to the studio.
Just wanted to point out that that particular example -which covers a lot of movie income- doesn't really require acceptance of intellectual property: the studio just needs to contract with the movie theaters before giving them a copy of the movie. They'll have no incentive to provide a copy to their competition, and a movie theater that displayed a "leaked" copy would lose business from the studios.
A movie theater could be paid to leak to a rogue theater in a different market, assuming the studio couldn't tell which theater leaked the movie. (Hey! This is a scenario where DRM might actually work!)
But note that PG's essay mostly comes from pragmatism, and what I've described is similar to the way things are today. It's a hard fact that copyright enforcement on individuals is fundamentally incompatible with universal computation and ubiquitous Internet. I, for one, am much more worried about the Internet dying out (where "Internet" implies common adherence to the seminal End-to-End principle), than politicians suddenly deciding to legislate away the studios' box office revenue. As such, I will continue to oppose copyright in a non-nuanced manner, and work on Internet-preserving software.