One of my all-time heroes, Neil Young, just did an interview with Wired. Great stuff.
On fans who trade bootleg shows: “When I play a new song in concert, it’s immediately uploaded. Everyone has heard it before I put the record out. For a while, that was a negative thing for me. But with Greendale, I started using it deliberately.”
On lawsuits: “I can’t control what people do. I don’t want to.” (RIAA, are you listening?)
On MP3s: “MP3 quality sucks.” (Yeah, which is why I won’t pay anyone 99 cents for a compressed audio track that sounds like garbage in my living room.)
The man is a genius.
Ed Bott 
Doh! I just posted about this interview also Ed. He’s a big hero of mine too. It’s a great interview.
I guess Neil’s on the PR circuit. The cover story of last week’s LA Weekly was an interview with him, which you can still read at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/14/features-payne.php
But regarding piracy…one of the funniest videos I’ve seen is one that used to be on neilyoung.com. (I can’t find it now, and the site seems to be pretty much devoted to Greendale.) This video, shot in the late ’60s, shows Neil walking into a record store and browsing the bins. He discovers a bootleg of one of his albums, goes up to the cashier (who doesn’t really know who he is) and tells him he wants to take his music back. They go around in circles arguing for a long time, and finally Neil just walks out with it. Great stuff!