It’s not the fault of the ISPs, never mind that they are, according to McGuinness, “destroying the recorded music industry” by failing to tackle piracy. Nor is it the fault of Apple (AAPL) and the makers of other digital media players who are wrongly profiting from their “burglary kits.” Nor can it be blamed solely on Silicon Valley and its “entrepreneurial, hippie values,” which in McGuinness’s opinion have bred a deep disregard for the true value of music.

No, it appears there’s no one to blame for this particular cock-up but Universal Music, which mistakenly put the album up for sale earlier this week at getmusic.com.au. It was only available there for a brief period, but there was time enough for fans to buy it legally. Not surprisingly, copies of the record began showing up on torrent indexes a short while later.

An embarrassing turn of events for a band that had gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent exactly this situation from happening. Still, as TechDirt’s Mike Masnick notes, there’s a lesson to be learned here. “At some point, folks in the music industry are going to (finally) recognize a rather simple fact: it just takes one digital copy of a song/movie/whatever to get out there, and it’s everywhere. You can’t stop it. No matter how annoying it is. No matter what laws it violates. It will happen.”

At the Music Matters confab in Hong Kong, McGuinness slagged broadband Internet service providers, accusing them of aiding and abetting music piracy while CD sales and royalty payments to musicians plunge. “The recorded music industry is in a crisis, and there is crucial help available but not being provided by companies who should be providing that help–not just because it is morally right, but because it is in their commercial interest,” said McGuinness, adding that Internet service providers have been “turning their heads” away from the music industry’s troubles. “One way or another, ISPs and mobile operators are the business partners of the future for the recorded-music business. But they are going to have to share the money in a way that reflects what music is doing for their business. The music business once had to bear the accusation that it was full of dinosaurs who looked back to an old business model rather than embracing a new one,” McGuinness said. “Today, though, it is the music business that is charting the way to the future. If there are dinosaurs around today, I think they are the Internet free-thinkers of the past who believe that copyright is the great obstacle to progress, that the distributors of content should enjoy profits without responsibilities and that the creators and producers of music should simply subordinate their rights to the rights of everyone else.”

By Internet free-thinkers, McGuinness presumably means those crazy longhairs in Silicon Valley whom he accused of destroying the recorded music industry in another keynote address back in January. “Embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music,” he said at the time. “I suggest we shift the focus of moral pressure away from the individual P2P file thief and on to the multibillion dollar industries that benefit from these countless tiny crimes: the ISPs [internet service providers] the telcos [telecom companies], the device-makers. … We must shame them into wanting to help us. Their snouts have been at our trough feeding free for too long.”

Out of the car, longhair …