While film executives and the celebrity-starved gear up for the 8th Shanghai International Film Festival, the city's not-so-seedy underbelly reels from a pointless blow. Shanghai's pirated-DVD sellers have been swept away like gutter trash.

Lan Yiming, deputy head of Shanghai's culture inspection bureau, told the Associated Press that this was the result of an attempt to "create a good cultural environment for the international film festival and give guests from home and abroad a good impression".

However, an impression is the only thing people will get - brooms have never swept truth off the streets.

In the weeks leading up to the June 11 film festival start date, DVD shops fearfully stashed away their pirated copies and street vendors were nowhere in sight.

Before the film festival even started, the sellers of pirated DVDs had already been back on the streets for several days. It seems the recent pressure from the government and the big film companies couldn't jam the flood gates on the double-edged Chinese entrepreneurial spirit that foreign investment has come to love.

The film industry's fruitless bullying is becoming eerily similar to that of the prehistoric music industry. Since Napster - the Internet's first large-scale music file-sharing program - the major labels have been grappling with illegal downloading, blaming it for everything from lagging sales to escalating CD prices.

Then the lawsuits started. Everyone from children to professors were fair game. Instead of rolling with the punches like other industries dealing with technological change, the music industry stumbled around like a drunken dinosaur. In February 2005, the Recording Industry Association of America even attempted to sue a deceased non-computer-owning grandmother. They eventually dropped the case, blaming an information gathering time-lag and the lengthy legal process.

What actually made Napster illegal was its hardware. It maintained servers - actual physical computers - and kept a database of all the illegal files. In July 2001, a judge ordered Napster to stop copyrighted file transfers. This would have been impossible and Napster promptly shutdown.

But the flood of new ways to download illegal files continued.

Programs like eMule, Kazaa and Soulseek have replaced Napster. However, the most important new way to download seems to be "torrent-downloading", through programs like BitTorrent.

Torrents operate like phone calls, and are downloaded through websites that act like switchboards. Everytime a website gets shut down, the online community teams up and launches mirrored websites.

The scale of illegal file downloading and the ease with which almost anyone can do it has forced some aspects of the music industry to think long and hard about their future.

In 2002, Roxio, a digital media software company, bought Napster and turned it into an online music download centre for paying members. And Napster isn't alone. Yahoo!'s Musicmatch and Apple's iTunes Music Store are just two other big names in the emerging legal music-download market.

There is a lesson in this, especially since file-sharers deal in movies as well as music. Both industries deal in the commodity of blockbuster entertainment and can no longer claim "art" as an excuse to stagnate. They must evolve or the industries as we know them will die out. Although it might already be too late, the music industry is trying to rise from its ashes before the embers go cold. The film industry could learn a thing or two.

In North America, theatre audiences are assailed with ever-increasing ticket prices and then show up at theatres to be subjected to the ludicrous insult of forced anti-piracy propaganda.

The threat to the film industry doesn't lie in street-vendors selling pirated DVDs, it lies in its inability to stare at itself straight in the mirror and admit that it's graying around the temples. It's naive to think Chinese consumers will go from paying 7 or 8 yuan (84 or 96 US cents) for a DVD to 50 yuan (US$6) or more for legitimate copies or to see the films in theatres.

The 8th Shanghai International Film Festival highlighted these problems. But instead of being used as a venue to address these new challenges in the Chinese market, it acted as an excuse to brush them off the streets and under the rug.

If they can't sue them, hide them, or beat them, they should try to learn from them or join them. In the meantime, I'm going to take my fight to Shanghai's streets and buy myself some really, really cheap DVDs.