"McGrath, that last paragraph just doesn't fly. Why the hell would anyone spend the $4,000 to $7,000 US it requires in the hopes that they get more bookings? And why would anyone purchase the CD at the live show if they knew they could go home and download it for free?"

Well I suppose I'm not thinking in terms recordings that take thousands of dollars on making a recording. With modern technology brilliant quality recordings are cheap and easy to make. All right, they don't have the clever siound engineers making it sound better than it does in real life, and cleaning up the bum notes and so forth. But that's not what I want.

I'm thinking of the kind of recordings that most singers I see at folk clubs and so forth sell at the end of the evening, and which I buy because I've enjoyed them, and I'd sooner have it on their CD or tape then and there to take home. It's a supplement to the payment for the gig, from musicians who are trying to make a living, not businessmen who are trying to make a killing.

As I indicated, what I want to see is that kind of music made available by the people who make it through the net, and that's where MP3's and so forth come in. All right, the same technology can be used to get hold of music from people who don't want to make it available. The same way you can use guns to kill people as well as squirrels. (So far as I'm concerned I'm for the squirrels as well, so I'm against the guns anyway, but I accept the point that tools shouldn't be dismissed out of hand because they can be misused. And please don't let's drift into talking about gun control on this thread.)

As for property right - I think as a moral thing, personal property rights extend to what you can use personally. Over and above that it's a question of maybe you have a stewardship authority over something, like a forest or stretch of country or a city block, but it's to be exercised on behalf of a wider community than you personally or even your family. If you write a song or a story it falls somewhere in betweeen - for example I don't think anyone would have a right to say noone else could sing their song, and they weren't going to either.