In a gesture that mirrors a petition the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) is presenting to Congress, Flowerburger Records is circulating a petition requesting that the British Parliament and the BPI, Britain's recording industry trade group, stop the lawsuits against music fans and develop constructive alternatives aimed at compensating artists.

"Fans generally want payment for musicians but cannot always afford to buy CDs or downloads and will therefore naturally use P2P file-sharing and other downloading methods to listen to music," the petition states. "The music industry is a creative industry that should be exploring ways to earn money for its artists from P2P, not using the destructive force of litigation."

Flowerburger also points out that it "fully supports the proper payment of musicians and the creators of music but believes there are better ways of achieving this than suing fans."

As we've said before, we, too, want to see musicians, songwriters, and, yes, record labels paid for their labors and we look forward to a solution to the problem that doesn't punish the music business's most enthusiastic consumers. Flowerburger's petition may well be overly optimistic, but it does ask an important question: Why can't a creative industry devise a creative solution rather than relying upon an ineffective punitive one?