It's gotta be common sense that Napster would lose this case primae facie. I mean really folks. Did you really think that 200 years of copyright law would be set aside just because some smart ass technoboy with a hot product started whining about an 'open web and free music for the people.
July 26,2000	If you want free music, turn on the radio (alternately, you could spend the next x years learning to play music well enough to conceive, record, produce and deliver your own music. This is not altogether a smart-ass answer. The discipline necessary to accomplish the aforementioned tasks would, I feel, make a new, more contemplative and reasonable person out of any human being.)

Short of that, however, if you want to reproduce entertainment media for yourselves and your friends, in essence becoming an ad hoc music distributor, you must pay for the privilege. Simple as that. All the fancy talk about peer-to-peer, proof of ownership, downloadable file formats and new business models don't mean anything when compared to the concept of COPYRIGHT and the infringement of same. Young people are generally ignorant of these rules and new companies like Napster are willfully ignorant hoping to do an end-run around the rules in the atmosphere of near-confusion and frenzy around the new 'wild west' that the Internet seems to represent to some people.

There is really not a lot else you can say about this matter except that a huge reality tsunami is about to hit the world of E-whatever. Just because you can manipulate an image in Photoshop doesn't make you an artist and just because you can create a button on a web page does NOT make you a programmer. Just because you can drag and drop songs from commercial CD's and make a custom mix does NOT make you a creator of music and in most cases, YOU need to PAY the CREATOR of these ORIGINAL works because without them, YOU would NOT HAVE any NEW SONGS or PICTURES or IDEAS. Napster (or should we say B2B or C2C peer-to-peer media sharing technology) has a place in the world--just as soon as we have the artists permission and compensation system in order.

Being a Napster users does NOT make you a bad person, it certainly doesn't mean that creative folks are above you, in fact they oftentimes are NOT GREAT people, merely blessed ones. What this does mean though, is that you OWE CREATIVE PEOPLE for the vision which they exhibit. YOU should WANT to compensate them, forget about the idea of a big exploitive company because that is going to GO AWAY. Respect and nurture the artists who reach you. They will respect and further nurture you. Why would you want to rip off an artist who has brought you pleasure? It is easy to think about ripping of BIG IMPERSONAL companies and that may or may not be appropriate, but as an artist and technofreak of long standing, I implore you to develop respect for the artists you like.

Let's now create the perfect system where the artist connects directly to his/her audience and that audience can seamlessly audition and purchase whatever increment of the artists' work they wish. Whether or not the artist is independent or affiliated with a worldwide entertainment conglomerate is irrelevant. The transaction is the same and the performing rights and digital rights management will take place transparently in the background internationally.

(You'd think the republicans would be in favor of limiting guns because lately they seem to be shooting themselves in the foot--and that foot is in their mouths.)