Jack, the question remains: is bandwidth the real reason for kicking Napster from the university nets, or just a feeble excuse for knuckling under to the recording industry ?

However that may be, here is an article (about a year old) by Jaron Lanier entitled "Piracy is Your Friend". He holds that "The reason the Recording Industry Association of America and the labels are pushing anti-piracy laws and technologies has nothing to do with preventing piracy. They're doing it so that they can control the new digital music channels. To keep anyone else, like you, from sharing the power. They're doing it to rip you off. Period."

I disagree with Lanier on one point. Lanier seems to assume that recording music from the radio is copyright infringement. I think (but this is strictly private opinion, not legal advice) that in many cases private recording is either a fair use or is allowed by the "no action shall be brought" clause which deals explicitly with home recording. But everything I have been able to learn about the big record labels suggests that Lanier is right that the major labels often treat their artists badly. So I think he's probably right that artists wouldn't lose much if they could devise a way to work independently of the major labels. Whether any such experiments in marketing can succeed is far from certain. But I agree with Lanier that the experiment should be tried.

T.