DIGITAL REALITIES

“For all the record companies’ bleating about lost sales, nobody is about to starve. But in highlighting how hard it is to control digital content once it is let loose on the Internet, Napster and its sort are merely the tip of a far bigger iceberg. As books, videos and other digitisable works go online, the same problems over copying and distribution are likely to arise. And the biggest difficulty is that, even if Napster, say, were shut down by the courts, many other, more powerful, systems are waiting to take its place that have been designed to be still harder to control.” – The Economist