The French never thought of a revolution like this....

It's an open and shut case for me. Maybe taping off the radio was illegal, maybe taping off a CD and giving it to a friend was illegal. Who knows? I doubt that the FBI wastes their time making dossiers on people who want to make sampler CDs for their friends.
What's an even more interesting issue here is what the future holds for mp3s. This is what will really chill the music industry, and what makes the position of Napster, mp3.com, and others, such a sweet position to hold. They are in the forefront of a new musical movement that is fundamentally fueled by anonymous downloaders who, as a whole, are not so nameless anymore, banning of select Napster users aside. To put it briefly, music buyers aren't pleased. Music fans don't see the point in a CD being sold anywhere from $14 to $19 when mostly middlemen get the money. CD buyers have an alternative now if they choose to use it, and many are. The "traffic" in mp3s, pardon the term, is growing and not slowing because of the publicity. Mp3 downloaders are by and large aware of their activities, and not at all apologetic. Drug traffickers and gang leaders step aside! Mp3 downloader hoodlums are nipping at your heels for the slot at public enemy #1! Or maybe not. Then everyone would have to be locked up, including me.

Throwing the book at mp3 downloaders isn't the solution, nor is denial and insistence on the benign nature of mp3 downloading any help either. Whether it's stealing or sharing, it's here. It's not just that everyone wants to get something for nothing, and clearly, when you download an mp3 you are getting something that at any other time you would have to spend money to get. It's that the world is simply changing, only for the billionth time since the world began. What the arch enemies, the music industry and the mp3-ers, will do in relationship to one another is what will determine the course of this change, and the music industry had better think of something fast before it becomes the consumate villain in a music revolt.
Mp3s are fast becoming legitimate, and not just a way for kids to not have to pay for "their rock-n-roll music." In many ways, this is about the attitude of the "haves" versus the "have-nots." The "haves" are scrambling to preserve the world they once knew; the "have-nots" are creating their own elite in the world they're calling their own. Or at least until some savvy business whiz can figure out how to really make money off of mp3 technology, something that has been used to circumvent the moneymaking machine of the music industry altogether.

The technology is in the hands of the masses, and it's going to be impossible to put the fire out.

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