I know.

In the 'old days', it seemed more benign. Actually, it didn't 'seem' anything, because it didn't seem like an issue.

So what if, across the nation, a few thousand not-so-affluent folks made cassette-copies of somebody else's cassette. Yeah - they (the artist, the industry) were out the equivalent of $$$... Maybe, maybe not. A lot of those people are people who wouldn't have bought it in the first place (remember - they're not so affluent).

Today, it's Metallica being able to identify 330,000 iterations of this phenomenon. At least two orders of magnitude.

Oddly (in an introspective way), I don't have as much a problem with people doing it as I do with people justifying their actions. Like - if I can justify it, I'm not responsible -or- I'm not so bad. (But that's another conversation).

Like I said - I don't know the answer. But the current scenario, compounded by the more elusive set-ups like Gnutella... they've pretty much already predisposed a revolution of the economics governing intellectual property.

(Did that sentence just come out of my head?)

mc