It’s nice to think that we would act with rectitude when faced with a dilemma. In short, we would each do the right thing if only we were treated as adults.

This idea must have prompted Radiohead, the arch exponents of gloom rock, to adopt an honesty-box approach to the distribution of their latest album In Rainbows. The album has been available to download freely from the band’s website as unrestricted MP3 files, with fans encouraged to pay whatever they thought it was worth.

However, research released last week by ComScore, a US analyst, revealed two-thirds of those who snapped up a copy of In Rainbows paid nothing, and that the average price paid by those who did put their hands in their pockets was only £3.

Stung by the suggestion their fans were disloyal the band described the figures as “wholly inaccurate” and not reflective of the true success of the project.

Maybe so. But the news that there is any money to be made will prick the ears of bands such as the Charlatans, who are to give downloads of their next album away for free.

Even Cliff Richard has adopted innovative online marketing for downloads of his new album, Love. The price fell according to the number of people who downloaded it.

The wider issue is of course all the digital hyenas who continue to devour the tide of freebies that file-sharing technology has made so readily accessible. According to David Price, head of piracy intelligence at Envisional, a research company that tracks these matters, “the overall level of file sharing has increased throughout 2007 and there are upwards of 10m people connected at any one time, roughly 500,000 of whom are in the UK”.

There’s nothing new about file sharing. It has been a popular activity for years – albeit one that is against the law for copyrighted material – but it has become so much easier and is no longer the preserve of skint teenage geeks with time on their hands. It has long accounted for about two-thirds of all UK consumer internet traffic by volume of data, says Price, and given the growth in broadband take-up it is clear the overall level is mushrooming.

So is the game up for the cigar-chomping record company bosses? They are defiantly fighting a battle on two fronts as the pirates grow ever more confident on one hand while on the other, stadium-filling stars such as Madonna break away from the traditional record labels and go their own way by seeing live performances as their main moneyspinner.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI, the industry body of the UK record labels and the organisation charged with protecting the rights of recording artists, recently admitted times were tough. “Generating sales through marketing is an uphill battle when your product is available for free in the shop next door, legally or otherwise,” he said.

Meanwhile, the file-sharing community is growing bolder by the day. The Pirate Bay, a Swedish-based website that hosts links showing where to illicitly find music or movies for nothing has long been a thorn in the side of the record industry. Recently, in an act of indecent bravado, it pinched the domain name of the BPI’s international umbrella organisation (www.ifpi.com – which used to belong to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) and cheekily renamed it the International Federation of Pirates Interests. That’s a bit like snatching a police car to use as a getaway vehicle.

The BPI is fighting back, though, making the most of its victories and boldly proclaiming “another success” in its war on pirates. Recently it succeeded in taking down Oink, a large UK-based music file-sharing resource, as well as the TV-links.co.uk website, which made it easy to view television shows illicitly.

But as fast as it puts a finger in the dyke, water springs from another hole with new file-sharing sites replacing those closed down. In addition, China is increasingly the location of choice for free download sites. It’s far away from the BPI’s jurisdiction and almost impossible for it to penetrate, despite the BPI’s brave words about international cooperation.

Maybe it’s time to take a different tack then. Perhaps the record and film industry should offer consumers cheaper options for legitimately downloading music and movies and beat the pirates by improving quality. They could also ensure the downloads are not riddled with restrictions. Then we might see the tide turn again in favour of honesty.

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