If you're a Twitter user (and the Guardian is very likely to assume you are), you will have been unable to avoid many angry geeks filling your timeline with tweets about the digital economy bill that was recently, ah, pushed through the Commons after a brief sojourn in the Lords.

And so a debate that was initially concerning because of the impositions it placed on internet users quickly became about the problems of the parliamentary process, a change of focus I'm sure the BPI and Conservative party were very happy about. While we should be filled with righteous ire over how this has trampled on our rosy conceptions of how parliament should work (which has been covered more than amply elsewhere on Cif), we should not forget the reasons the government so desperately want this bill to go through. They genuinely, deeply, believe they are helping the "content industries". Wait. The "creative industries."

Modern uses of copyrighted material are more varied than we could ever legislate for, and some people are getting away with iniquitous business models while others are unfairly penalised for having great ideas that threaten established business models. The intractability of these problems has been ignored at the convenience of protecting the "creative industries". Creative industries that many of us who work in creative businesses find increasingly hard to recognise.

Those creative industries are quoting losses of hundreds of millions of pounds, based on the deeply flawed assumption that every download is a lost sale, and that is assuming they're able to know how many illegal downloads are really happening. Creative industries that, despite these spurious losses (data from the Official Charts Company shows that sales of single tracks in 2009 have now surpassed the previous all-time record of 115.1m, set in 2008), can afford lobbyists in the finest Saville Row suits.

Let's face it: the record industry for one is no longer in the business of creating. It succeeded in growing through creating demand, and then creating artificial supply problems. In the conventional music recording industry, whole departments are dedicated to getting airtime on popular radio stations, arranging incredible advances to cover recording studio costs and tying artists into five-album contracts that can be traded between labels. Meanwhile, bands are sitting in garages, recording singles on their Macs, publishing their music on MySpace and selling albums for as much as people are prepared to pay. They still desperately want recording contracts, but the economics are slowly moving in favour of the artists, not the middle men.

The digital economy bill is driven by incompetence, not malice. Ably assisted by a three-line whip. And what justified incompetence! The copyright situation in this country is utterly confusing. Parts of the bill that have solid commercial sense behind them, such as clause 43, interact with so many other laws and precedents that it will be impossible to find a solution to the orphan works problem without annoying some group of creators. This week alone, both Labour and the Conservatives put out a campaign poster that violated copyright principles. Even the (putative) communications director of the BPI was found on Twitter advocating copyright abuse the same day as the vote on the digital economy bill.

Truth is we aren't going to catch up to new uses of copyright, whether they be innovative new business models or egregious violations of other people's rights. The game is changing too fast to try and add legislation to cover every eventuality. Simpler will be better than complex, and copyright will have to be simplified to be usable. This is what every creator, creative business and politician should be striving for: a modern copyright system that rewards creative people, creates a plethora of new business models, supports old industries in modernising and is focused not on criminalising consumers, but empowering producers. Instead, the passing of the digital economy bill has made a stark choice clear: we can prop up the big record labels for another five years by criminalising a generation, or we can enthusiastically support a creative economic renaissance by providing a framework for reuse, remixing and fair use of creative products.