That's why in the long run the anti-Napster campaign is as doomed as Prohibition. For all sorts of reasons, some good ones and some rationalizations, people don't feel that they're doing anything wrong when they trade music files with Napster. Maybe they're already spending hundreds of dollars a year on overpriced CDs. Maybe they're sick of the music industry's habit of packaging one hit with a bunch of dud tracks. Maybe they just want to check out music before buying it in ways that the current dismal radio-and-MTV universe simply don't allow.

Whatever the reason, 20 million users can't all be locked up and thrown in jail. The recording industry is in for a long, fruitless siege if it sets out to shut down each little Napster clone or slap a writ on every individual who uses Gnutella. Ultimately, if it wants to stop people from engaging in Napster-like behavior, the only thing that could work would be to shut down the Internet itself. Good luck.

Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here's a piece of software that cultivates people's taste for new music and that appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity!

But by treating Napster as the copyright antichrist, the industry is simply insuring that the vector of Internet technological development will move rapidly toward a lawsuit-proof, free-for-all distributed network of file-sharing -- the very outcome the owners of intellectual property wish to avoid. How stupid can you get?

Of course, the deepest irony of all is that it is the music industry that chose not to protect its copyrights in the first place. Where do you think all those illegally copied music tracks on Napster come from? From people's legally paid-for CDs, of course. But the CD audio standards established by the music companies themselves have never included any kind of copyright protection technology.

Why doesn't the music industry start doing so today? Because you and I would be steaming mad about having to buy all-new stereos and Walkmen to listen to the new-format CDs. Maybe we'd stop buying CDs altogether. Maybe we'd turn to the Net for our music.

For music lovers, the bad news today is that if and when Napster shuts its servers down, we will have to find our music through other channels. The good news is that the brain-dead, colossally wasteful, artistically homogenizing old order of the recording industry is committing collective, time-delayed suicide in court.

Good riddance, I say. These institutions have never served artists or listeners well. Once they're gone or rendered irrelevant, maybe there'll be room for a new, better order.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.