Thomas Jefferson opposed copyright, but it's in the United States Constitution anyway. He couldn't settle it with the founding fathers then, and he wouldn't settle it with Edgar Bronfman, Jr. now. Anyway, the issue is profits, not What's Right.

Music's March
Until this century, music meant live performance. Now music means recordings. We humans devised phonographs, audio cassettes, compact discs, and now MP3, the crown prince of music.

Music is a series of tones of varying duration. Music is what you hear, not what you touch. We buy CDs for the music they contain, not the curious plastic pancake and psychedelic aluminum film. Traditional music distributors are precariously positioned: At any time, technology may obviate physical music media.

To be as valuable in the virtual world as in the physical world, it is incumbent upon the recording industry to mechanize once more. Consumers liked CDs more than cassettes and the industry answered the call. If consumers like downloading music more than hunting it down at record outlets (and they do), then the recording industry must find a way to capitalize on downloads just as they capitalized on all other music media to date. Otherwise, the recording industry will go the way of the pony express.

Fortunately, industries adapt. The Internet has proven to be a boon to brokerages and newspapers. I outline a possibility for music distributors below.

Blue Skies or Stormy Seas?
Ensure profits for the copyright holder, and this whole saga becomes a distant memory.

Here's a veritable panacea for copyright holders that fellow Experimental Computing Facility member Tracy Scott floated: use incentives. If you could profit (a few pennies, even) from a paying downloader, would you let someone download from you for free? Internet vernacular: Would you rather someone paid to soak up your Internet connection, or would you let them leech for free? Split the revenue and everyone profits.

In contrast, Hurricane Internet brews.

Currently, people don't pay for downloaded music because they can't. EMI's recent efforts proved dubious: It costs more to download (at zero to marginal cost) Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon than to buy the CD (at non-zero-to-marginal cost), and it's nearly impossible to find an authorized download site.

Internet users are notoriously intolerant. Missteps and threats will provoke technologists to respond in ways that will be apocalyptic for music profiteers. Technologists are mobilizing already. Napster, Gnutella, and FreeNet are mere toys compared to what's next. Recording companies look to unbreakable ciphers. The kid next door will employ those same ciphers in his next creation: the strong-encryption, untraceable, distributed NapTellaNet. This is a one-horseman apocalypse.

It's important to keep in mind that the Internet is fast, vast, and fluid. It's not just kids; it's everyone. We get email praising Gnutella from senior citizens, government employees, and other professionals. They'll all embrace NapTellaNet, and the resulting digital storm surge will be devastating and irreversible.

Shutting down Napster does but one thing: It triggers what's next.

Controls Aren't the Answer
Helmet-toting technologists glide down the road at 160 miles per hour in shiny RX-7s, racing ahead of the legal system and revolutionizing the industries they encounter.

SDMI, watermarks, Internet wire taps, and the like will all be foiled, and the Internet's fluidity means it takes but one spoiler to cause a digital rights train wreck. Purchase the new digital rights-approved Britney Spears song. Punch in the key and play it through ripping software. Out pops an unencumbered MP3. Share it on NapTellaNet, and 100 million people can download it. Only moral qualms can cool the fire. If record companies thought that was enough, they'd furlough their lawyers.

I don't pasture several hundred horses and hitch them to a carriage in the morning. Transportation's mechanization made cars with all those horses conveniently stabled under the bonnet (no poop, either). Music's mechanization packs 500 audio CDs onto a hard disk smaller than my mobile phone, all downloaded from the Internet. The question is whether traditional recording companies will choose to be a constructive part of that experience.

Technology's march is random and unstoppable. Business employs Technology but cannot enslave it. The new economy is about shifting gears to embrace and exploit technologies as consumers adopt an Internet lifestyle. Anyone stuck in first will be left in the digital tire smoke.

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