Napster may be dead, but the new means of music distribution will still be the Web, at least until the next poly-connected hyperlink medium arrives (mental MIDI?).

This is the beginning of a new era in what we have always called "property". Remember that in our western system of politics there were really very few laws or customs dealling with even real hard stuff like rocks and trees until the Magna Carta in 1215 - before that everything just belonged to the King. We have had 800 years of common law developed about real property, and for the last 100 years or so we have been trying to apply the same techniques to "intellectual" property, works of art and the like.

Now we think we can copyright even little bits of software, and ideas like using rainbows in corporate logos. Hoo Ha. Copyrights in physical materials like books and tapes will soon be impossible to enforce. Check out the successors to Napster like WinMX, look at the threads all over the great MUDCAT - there is simply no way to put this genie back in the bottle.

The corporations, as always, are fighting to develop new standards, new encryption techniques, new ways to maintain their commercial power (which I'm sure we all agree has little to do with the welfare of the artists or authors). But they are behind the curve, and I suggest that they wil not catch up, any more than various kings could have re-appropriated their ownership of damn near everything.

So how do artists and authors get due reward from this new and vastly expanded market, which they should now be able to get to without the intervening distributors and middlers? Ay, there's the rub. Do we users have a kind of checkoff fee, a nickel a song or some such (that's way more than artist get now, of course)? Can we bank some form of e-credits against downloads? Maybe Mudcat would be a good forum to begin something like this - here we have a community which has a strong connetion to the shared experiences of the collective.

Anyway, just ramblin'.

johnk