The words and images coming out of the entertainment industry the past couple of weeks seem on the surface encouraging to everyone who listens or buys digital music and who wants more freedom to play to watch TV or post video content online. They promise more freedom and more flexibility.

If you believe it, I’ve got some trombones, 76 to be exact, I’d like to sell you.

It was just about 100 years ago, 1912 to be exact, that Professor Harold Hill made his famous stop in River City, Iowa. As the story for “The Music Man” goes, “Professor” Hill was running a con – selling uniforms and instruments he never intended to deliver for a town band that would never exist.

The descendents of the Music Man appear to be proliferating these days, promising new advances in music delivery and digital technology but delivering much less, if anything. A headline the other day in the Times was instructive: “Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music.” It seems some record-company executives at a big international music conference are toying with the idea of allowing consumers to purchase music that doesn’t come all nicely wrapped up with Digital Rights Management (DRM) software – the kind of thing that prevents songs from Apple’s iTunes from being played on any other type of music device.

That song has been getting a lot of play lately in a variety of formats. CBS President Les Moonves and Disney President Bob Iger each went to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to show off their new accommodations to technology and the desires of their customers. Moonves shared the stage with Blake Krikorian, one of the founders of Sling Media, the makers of the Slingbox that allows local TV to be watched anywhere. Sling has a new feature allowing for clips of programs to be posted online. Iger talked about the creation of new online communities.

“The Music Man” had a happy ending (in River City at least). Should we expect a happy ending here, with the content industries foregoing technological protection measures and embracing consumer choice? The evidence suggests not, despite the big show of tech friendliness.

Consider first the lawsuit that the major record companies have filed against XM Radio over consumer devices that record music, claiming violation of copyright law. There’s no way to get the music off of the devices, so there’s no threat of theft, but that’s not enough for the recording industry. They are peeved that in a digital age, consumers have the ability to set a device to record music ahead of time and to break out the songs into separate playlists of their choosing. The recording industry prefers you go back to tape recorders, which allowed recording the way the radio station broadcast it.

Then, there’s the PERFORM Act, sponsored by the record companies. This legislation (S. 256) sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and others, reinforces the attack on satellite and digital radio with government-mandated content controls.

As XM Chairman Hugh Panero pointed out in a speech at the CES: “So while they [record companies] are claiming in court that we are breaking the law, they are claiming in Congress that the law needs to be changed because we aren’t breaking it. As we used to say the Bronx, you got to admire that kind of chutzpah.”

While it’s great that an industry statement like Moonves praised the technical ability for consumers to move video clips around, he’s not about to endorse a freewheeling YouTube universe. He said at CES after showing a view-made mash-up of his wife, CBS personality Julie Chen: “It’s kind of interesting to be in the space that way to see what happens when talented people who are passionate about our content get a place to express themselves. This is a new frontier and we’re watching it very carefully. And we’ll see just how much it benefits the exposure and promotion of the content owner.” And Disney’s new mash-up world it’s creating only works with Disney content within the Disney universe.

Those comments don’t sound as if the content industry is willing to give up its control over consumers lightly, if at all, despite the happy talk and sales pitches for trombones. It will push ahead to restrict technology, through the courts, state legislatures and Congress. It’s up to those of us who value our rights to make sure the content moguls are kept at bay.

If we lose, then we might as well go back to the equivalent of typewriters, and ditch these fancy laptops and printers. MP3s, CDs and video files will be of no more use than vinyl.