This is not a loss but a wind of change precipitated by technology and new ways of communicating, which will always reform our sense of contract and reality in consequence. The Napster case and the MP3 case are symptoms of the engagement between open communication systems, and commercial structures built on legacies of partition and separation. When the divisions fall before the growth of technical possibility, the dynamics of the market changes. The bloodshed being precipitated in cases like these is a rearguard action. For a beautiful essay or two on this subject see John Perry Barlow writing in the current edition of "Wired". (www.wired.com, but not yet updated!). In an earlier similar essay, he offers the following quote from Jefferson. I offer it to emphasize that balanced against our great losses, we should always also recall the strides mankind has made in the direction of better communication, higher freedom, and most important, new and sometimes better ideas:

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, itis the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession ofeveryone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every otherpossesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapableof confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subjectof property."

Regards,

Amos