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But the only "alternative" anybody is willing to propose is some BS variation on the ever popular hacker contention that "information wants to be free"

No, that isn't the alternative. We can honor our founding generation by balancing copyright holder needs with public needs. We need a rich public domain. The public domain is our country's cultural legacy. It says as much about us as the works of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates about the ancient Greek world. We need to limit copyright to a single 20 year term for non-functional copyright with a second 20 year term possible. Functional copyrights need to be limited to only 2-5 years. Source code written before I was born should not enter the public domain after I'm dead and gone. It gives the public absolutely nothing in return for the restraints on individual rights needed to maintain its artificial scarcity. No generation of software developers can look at the code and learn something from it. That said, you are being very intellectually dishonest. Of course we have an alternative, it's called prosecution of mass bootlegging. Caught selling bootlegs on the street? Lock the person up. Caught running a T3 into your house to host 30GB of 320kb mp3s, do the same if the computer is running Kazaa or Limewire with file sharing enabled. If the person has created a private IceCast host let them go, it's for their personal use and not for the public at large. The DMCA is a thought-crime statute. We had laws on the books before it that were balanced and provided the legal basis for taking down serious copyright infringers quite effectively.

Why do we need a rich public domain? Who gives a crap about the public domain? All public domain does is provide a fancy term for "something nobody's publishing anymore", and if nobody's publishing anymore that means nobody's buying it anymore, and if nobody's buying it anymore that means nobody wants it anymore. One of the big sources trying to move copyright ownership out has been musicians, one of the reasons you saw so many best of and live albums in the 70s was to renew the copyright. If you make copyright last 6 months the industry will find a way to make that forever.

We used to go after the mass bootlegger but with MP3 stuff it's nearly impossible. One of the problems is even the bootlegger doesn't know if he's a mass bootlegger anymore. I could load one file on a server and it could catch on as everybody's favorite link and millions could download it. Or I could spend a month loading half my music library on a server and nobody could care. Which one is the mass bootlegger, the guy that loads a million files and none get DLed or the one that loads one file that gets DLed a million times.