Copyright lost
RIAA screwed?
This interesting new article from cnet has the lawyer fighting for Napster (a program that lets thousands of people over the internet share their mp3 music) claiming a few interesting things: that downloading music off the net without paying for it is legal and possibly that anyone that tries to prevent it in a way that is anti-competition may lose the right to claim that copyright. If this were to be found legally true, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) would not be able to enforse copyright on it's music, and copying CDs, MP3 and so forth would be completely legal.

I'm torn on this. In one way I would love to see what would happen to the industry if mp3 piracy was made legal (at least for RIAA artists), however I definitely would not want bootlegging (as in copying of commercial CDs and selling as the authentic deal, not live CDs) to become legal.

Personally I would still buy CDs if I could get them all for free off the net, but definitely not as many. The ability to discover what is crap and what is worth buying would have reduced my last years purchases to two-thirds what I bought. Also, this sort of distribution would almost make the idea of singles completely pointless. I'd miss the b-sides.