Overvalued, irksome, conceited, pudge-faced, balding, boring, awful celebrity art nob Damien Hirst has apparently become embroiled in a ludicrous feud with a 19-year-old graffiti artist called Cartrain. Hostilities erupted in 2008, when Cartrain created a sarcastic collage that included an image of Hirst's stupid bling-encrusted skull "artwork" (the one that reportedly sold for £50m at auction, although that figure is disputed by virtually anyone who still retains some degree of faith in humankind).

When Cartrain's humorous collages were put up for sale online, Hirst reportedly complained to the Design and Artists Copyright Society. The website selling Cartrain's works buckled under legal pressure and surrendered the collages, along with an apology.

Witless appropriation

Obviously, this involved some chutzpah on Hirst's part, when you consider how much of his own output involves the witless appropriation of pre-existing material. When he isn't wowing his hateful audience of inconsequential moneyed idiots with meaningless collections of dots or bisected animal corpses, he's producing a whopping great reproduction of Humbrol's £14.99 Young Scientist Anatomy Set and selling it to Charles Saatchi for £1m – which would be an absolutely hilarious scam on a richly deserving target (a pretentious former ad exec who made his fortune heartlessly flogging cigarettes and Thatcherism to the masses) if the money went to a deserving cause rather than a nauseating irritant.

Anyway, so far, so 2008. But the Hirst-Cartrain battle resumed in July this year, when the latter strolled into Tate Britain and allegedly removed a box of pencils from Hirst's art installation "Pharmacy". Cartrain then created a mock ransom note, demanding the return of his collages in exchange for the pencils. If the artworks weren't given back, then the pencils would be "sharpened".

All rather daft and annoying. But a few weeks ago, Cartrain was arrested by Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad and told that the pencils had been valued at £500,000. The officers also initially arrested Cartrain's father, on the grounds that he was "suspected of harbouring the pencils".

The arrest may not be Hirst's fault, but sod it: let's appropriate any resultant outrage and apply it to him anyway. Cartrain's almost certainly a self-promoting gump and a poor man's Banksy – but he's 19, for heaven's sake. He's allowed to be an almost impossible arse.

Besides, unless it turns out to have been one huge, hilarious in-jokey art world wheeze involving the pair of them, it was Hirst who started it, mum. It was his behaviour in the first instance – throwing a legal fit over Cartrain's collages – that caused the current mess. It was an absurd tantrum over intellectual property rights, the big guy versus the little guy – just like Lord Mandelson's stupid proposal to have people who illegally download music kicked off the internet; a scheme that's outraged Billy Bragg, the drummer from Blur, thingy from Radiohead and one of Pink Floyd so much that they posed for a photograph and issued a press release and everything. And they were right to do so.

Apart from the occasional hardcore miser, the kind who'd shoplift at Oxfam, the vast majority of people who illegally download music from the internet do so because they bloody love music. They're resorting to theft because they're either too skint to afford 79p per track (often because they're students), or because what they're looking for is too obscure to find by commercial means, or because it's been leaked and isn't officially available and they're just too damn excited to wait. In the main, these are dedicated fans: precisely the same audience who in days of yore would've filled C90 cassettes with songs taped off the radio. In its heyday, the Radio 1 Sunday evening Top 40 countdown constituted the biggest file-sharing portal in British history, with millions of users hooked up simultaneously, mercilessly downloading content to their tape decks.

The government and the music industry should cheerfully view these people as eager young addicts. Let them have their illicit free samples because once they're hooked, they'll cough up later: when they've got more money, when the tracks are easier to find via legitimate means, or when they go to see an act they only discovered via free illegal downloads play live (and pay £30 for a ticket, £30 for drinks, and £30 for a poster and T-shirt).

But no. They're going to identify and isolate these fans and try to ban them from the internet. Christ knows how that's going to work. Perhaps they'll employ a uniformed enforcer to run in and physically knock the mouse out of your hand every 10 minutes. Maybe an email arrives, curtly informing you you've been fired from Google. Now clear your cache and get out. I guess the powers that be could pressurise local service providers, but if they start cutting off broadband connections willy-nilly, neighbourhood Wi-Fi "theft" will skyrocket. And how do you stop people using iPhones and other mobile internet devices? Smash their fingers with rocks? Position snipers on rooftops?

As in the tale of Hirst and Cartrain, it's the big guy who comes off looking small. Instead of figuring out new and imaginative ways to fleece consumers, the industry is throwing a tantrum. Trying to fight human nature and progress is an undertaking as doomed as repeatedly kicking a river in the hope it'll change course, and as mean as arresting a 19-year-old chancer for swiping a tosspot's pencils.