What happens when an inadequate legislative process meets networking technology? Answer: the Digital Economy Bill (aka Mandy's dangerous downloaders act), which finally staggered, slightly frayed, on to the statute book on Wednesday night.

For those who haven't been following the story, here's the gist. Many moons ago, Stephen (now Lord) Carter, the former Ofcom boss, was commissioned to produce a report on the communications and networking strategy Britain should follow in order to drag itself into the 21st century. He duly produced the Digital Britain report which, although remarkably unambitious on some issues, such as aspirations for nationwide broadband speeds, was also judicious and sensible on hot topics like file-sharing and "piracy". The stage was set for a deliberative path to legislation, probably timed for the next parliament.

Then events intervened. Lord Mandelson was recalled from Brussels and took over the government or, at any rate, its entire industrial strategy. He was got at by some content-industry moguls who told him that file-sharing and digital piracy must be stopped in order to protect what they quaintly call Britain's "creative industries". Mandelson bought the idea and suddenly the Digital Economy Bill found itself on the fast track.

The problem was that it's not easy to draft workable laws in this area. When the draft bill reached the upper house, its members unpicked it with fastidious intelligence, highlighting its flaws and seeking to improve it. The bill returned to the Commons in a state where it clearly required more work. But then the election was called and suddenly there was a need to decide which bills would go through on the "washup", by agreement of the two frontbenches.

Normally, this applies only to uncontentious bills, which this bill was clearly not. Nevertheless, it was railroaded through. The result: a fatally flawed bill will now become a fatally flawed law. And the next government will have to pick up the pieces.

How did this fiasco come about? Mainly because legislatures (both here and abroad) deal with intellectual-property issues in ways that are corrupt, irresponsible and inappropriate for modern technology.

The corruption stems from the fact that the process is largely driven by obeisance to powerful industrial lobbies, in this case, the content industries and the trade unions, which seek only to protect business models that are being rendered obsolete by networking technology.

Legislative irresponsibility stems from parliamentarians' failure to remember that intellectual property (IP) differs from other kinds of property rights, in that it's a government-granted, time-limited monopoly rather than an inalienable "right". Copyrights and patents represent an attempt to strike a balance between rewarding innovation on the one hand and the larger needs of society to build on that creativity, on the other. But in the last 50 years, the balance has become ludicrously skewed in favour of rights holders. The internet has highlighted the extent of the imbalance that now exists.

Legislators have a responsibility to strike a balance between the competing needs of right-holders and of society. But when it comes to copyright legislation, they ignore the public interest. So what we have is the kind of evidence-free lawmaking represented by Mandelson's bill. "Imagine," writes Professor James Boyle, a noted cyberlaw scholar, "a process of reviewing prescription drugs which goes like this: representatives from the drug company come to the regulators and argue that their drug works well and should be approved. They have no evidence of this beyond a few anecdotes about people who want to take it and perhaps some very simple models of how the drug might affect the human body. The drug is approved. No trials, no empirical evidence of any kind, no follow-up. Even the harshest critics of drug regulation would admit we generally do better than this. But this is often the way we make intellectual property policy."

The trouble is that in Westminster (or on Capitol Hill) nobody speaks for the future or for the wider needs of society. So we wind up with biased legislation framed in a rearview mirror. The fact that the internet makes it easy to copy and remix does indeed pose a challenge for IP regimes framed in the era of print. But that should be a spur for rethinking the regime, not for switching off the net – because that's what we will have to do in order to stop what's now going on.

The dangerous downloaders act won't stop file-sharing, but it will certainly inhibit online creativity. This government has legislated in haste; it will be for the next one to repent at leisure.