At the risk of sounding immodest, there are solutions to allow Napster (or other PtoP systems) to exist, folks to still make a profit, and ANONYMOITY PRESERVED (the latter is a notable lack in most of the current systems I've heard about).
Take a look at my paper in http://www.cs.orst.edu/~budd/digbat.pdf
Imagine the following scenairo. Your average garage band spends $200 to get a registration number and the software needed to encode their music for distribution. They put up a web page and start sharing their music. Thousands (well, manybe dozens) of people download their music and play it on their computers. Magically royalities start coming back to the garage band, in proportion to the degree to which their music is listened to. And yet there is no registration, nobody knows who is listeneing to what music (You really don't want Napster or EMI to know that you really like Britney Spears now, do you??). It can work. take a look.
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At the risk of sounding immodest, there are solutions to allow Napster (or other PtoP systems) to exist, folks to still make a profit, and ANONYMOITY PRESERVED (the latter is a notable lack in most of the current systems I've heard about). Take a look at my paper in http://www.cs.orst.edu/~budd/digbat.pdf Imagine the following scenairo. Your average garage band spends $200 to get a registration number and the software needed to encode their music for distribution. They put up a web page and start sharing their music. Thousands (well, manybe dozens) of people download their music and play it on their computers. Magically royalities start coming back to the garage band, in proportion to the degree to which their music is listened to. And yet there is no registration, nobody knows who is listeneing to what music (You really don't want Napster or EMI to know that you really like Britney Spears now, do you??). It can work. take a look.