News: Music business on a collision course
Starting with the assault on Napster and continuing to the present day, the people running the big studios have treated this dispute as the moral equivalent of war. All the while, they have refused to budge from the party line that digital file swapping is theft. It is a position that, by definition, puts compromise beyond the pale. (After all, how can you treat with common criminals?)

But treating this as a zero-sum game, where there is one winner and one loser, hasn't brought the music industry any closer to final victory. Illegal digital downloading is more rampant than ever. So how does the industry respond? It sics the lawyers on individual users accused of facilitating the sharing of digital music.

Oh yeah, as if that's going to help.

The truth is, it will only reinforce the impression that the music business is run by a clique of clueless prima donnas out of touch with the new reality that is the Internet.

They may be able to keep it up for a while, but then what? The legacy of baseball's own greed has come back to haunt the owners, with power shifting from owners toward the players. For baseball, free agency was the catalyst; for music consumers, it's going to be peer-to-peer technologies.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-956056.html