True enough it's not too likely that Monday's demo will get much attention - fiddling while Baghdad burns. But it's a foundation for the next step.

And 50,000 online signature, though impressive enough, isn't going to make them turn and run - but again it's going to lead on to very much higher numbers of people signing at festivals all over the place, and becoming aware of the situation and angry about it,in a way that would have seemed impossible a few months ago.

The chances are that the Act is going to go ahead without the simple amendments that could turn not from a clamp down on music to what it was claimed to be, "an explosion of liberty". But that just means that playing all kinds of unlicensed music in public becomes recognised as a kind of civil disobedience, a way of protesting against the government, and there is going to be as need for a lot of that for the foreseeable future, given such things as the push to war, and the hammering students and other things as well.

In a way this could potentially put people's music back where it belongs, at the heart of things.