Maybe true, maybe not, but they can definately make our lives miserable, so lets stop gloating and start working in Congress. This false security stuff bothers me.

AOL Founder: Censor the Net? Ha!: "Communist Vietnam, China, and even the U.S. government should think again if they believed they could censor the Internet, the founder of America Online said Monday."

Alternate view: Hail, Metallica! in Salon.

Watch 'dem lines... they bite.

The whole "Napster-the-company is responsible for our [hypothetical] lost income" bit only makes sense in isolation from the rest of the world. Applied elsewhere it's pretty scary.

And if you really want to nail Napster-the-company for enabling extensive illegal activities, then you better broaden your suit. Along with Apache and ftp server developers, and with the people who run IRC and the people who make the software to interface with it, like mIRC, you'd better add any other piece of software that is primarily or often used for illegal purposes. Are you going to nail Netscape for providing a newsgroup reader that allows anybody with an internet connection regardless of age to view porn?

I think there's still some confusion going on here. Napster-the-company is doing nothing illegal. All it does is offer software and provide a free indexing service. You may want to sue Napster-the-software... but you can't sue a piece of software.

More artists to sue Napster says Metallica lawyer: "Expect more headline acts to follow Metallica's lead and launch legal action against controversial software developer Napster - so says the metal band's lawyer, Howard King."

It's really only a PR issue that the industry grew, because the RIAA is right: "'If we grew 3 percent as an industry, maybe we could have grown twice as much,' [Alex Walsh, the vice president of market research for the RIAA] said. 'There is just no way to tell how much we could have lost. There is no scientific or empirical way to determine how much more music we could have sold.

Despite 'Piracy,' CD Sales UP: "the industry has been claiming rather loudly this year that digital piracy would hurt music retail. Despite the fact that the issue might not come up as focal point in the lawsuit, the fact that people are purchasing CDs at a higher rate than they were in 1999 is going to have to be addressed in the court of public opinion."