Over the past couple of weeks, like a bad tooth flaring up, the conflict over encryption and copyright has seeped into the news again. A selective and by no means comprehensive survey finds the following news items:

* Two Members of Congress celebrate eased encryption regulation by e-mailing a copy of PGP to the United Kingdom. Last month, that would have been a felony.

* A federal judge orders Web sites to remove software designed to break DVD's encryption.

* The programmer who reverse-engineered that encryption scheme is detained by Norwegian authorities, his computers and cellphone seized, his father (who owns his domain) indicted.

* The Recording Industry Association of America sues MP3.com for allowing customers to store digital copies of copyright music on its Web site.

* Time Warner, owner of one of the world's six major music distributors, buys EMI, one of the other six.

There are two counterbalancing trends here. One is that people who create things have a right to be paid for them. As an author and a musician I believe in that very keenly, and I'm proud that Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution specifically enumerates the protection of intellectual property as one of the duties of Congress. The opposite trend is that technology allows unparalleled access to markets and consumers, helping to break the stranglehold that MegaMedia has on promotion and distribution.

When Galileo proposed that the universe was not geocentric, he was forced on pain of death to renounce his science-based observation in favor of the Church-endorsed view of the cosmos. (To give you some historical perspective, this all happened a few years after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.) After he submitted and was given a life sentence of house arrest, the story goes that Galileo turned away from Pope Urban VIII and said under his breath, "Eppur si muove" ("And yet it moves"). And so it does.

Genies don't go back into bottles. Technology, once invented, has a habit of getting out. Judges can try to ban cracking software, but the world is a big place and there are an awful lot of hard drives out there. The recording industry can try to wish and litigate MP3 away, and with it the easy duplication and distribution of digital music. But in a world where five companies pretty much control the music you can buy and hear, and where record labels impose contracts that a Mafia chieftain would look at enviously, is it any wonder that people are using technology to break free?

If people want to copy-protect DVDs -- a reasonable desire, as they have the right to protect their intellectual property -- maybe they should design or use algorithms that a Norwegian teenager can't hack. If artists and record labels want to discourage the free swapping of unauthorized copies of music -- and remember that AOL is suddenly the world's largest record company -- maybe they should provide a free-market reason to discourage it, like higher-quality sound, cheap licensing, easy payments, and organized access to content.

What won't work are legal roadblocks, and crying about what's lost. The genie is out. The Earth yet moves. Deal with it.