Well, Mark,

For those who are using the Napster service as a strict aid for Piracy, I'm in agreement with you. That IS wrong.

However, as has been stated before - for out of print records and some rarities (and this actually is a small percentage of Napster's traffic) there is no other realistic option short of spending hours, days, weeks or months trying to locate the track through a collector or rarities vendor, and then paying an exorbitant fee of which the artist sees NOTHING from.

I've also used the service to check out songs for albums as to whether I wanted to buy it or not. For artists like Oscar Brand, the Irish Descenedants and Gaelic Storm, there is NO WAY to preview these and find out what the band sounds like. I've got 20 odd trash CDs that I picked up because I thought I'd give them a try, and now regret the $20 I dropped - being able to download and listen to a track has dramatically helped that, and enables me to now spend the money I'd have spent on a crap CD to instead support an artist that (IMO) deserves it.

MP3.com to my view isn't the gem that it's made out to be. Unfortunately, due to the relatively low number of artists on the service, I've found very few bands that I was interested in. It IS a good idea overall...

It's a complex issue... any attempt to boil it down to "you're wrong if you do this" ignores a host of other attendant issues within the larger. I'll accept "According to the RIAA, any use of Napster is wrong". Then again, according to them, you should be paying for every time you hear songs on the radio (or any other medium) and also be paying for every time you play a purchased CD.

M