By the time the RIAA, CRIA, and all of the other recording industry associations figure out which 71 year old grandparents and 12 year old kids they want to sue next, it may not be worth their trouble even by their own dreamworld justification.

Think about it.  Now that people are wising up to BitTorrent clients and sharing bigger files at higher transfer rates than we ever did using Napster (or Kazaa or Grokster or whatever), many have actually downloaded most of the music they actually want to have by now.  I can download entire discographies in one click.  I think it has probably been years since I searched for and downloaded one single track. 

I might decide that I want to hear a new release once in a while, but I’m not opposed to paying $5-10 for that as long as it plays on all the devices and players that I use for my digital music collection.  But even if I did, even if all of us downloaded new releases that we wanted, it would be nowhere near the volume of music that was downloaded illegally between 1999 and 2004.

To be honest, I think the music industry is worrying about the problem far too late.  They’ve already ridden out the worst of the storm.  People have downloaded all the back catalog music that they want by now.  A co-worker actually said to me the the other day, "My digital music collection is pretty mature now.  I’m focusing on movies."  As for the remaining laggards, they’ll download all 40 gigs of what they want in a matter of days. 

Sure labels have taken big hit to sales, but in fairness, they also put out 5 years worth of really horrible music.  One could make the argument that music industry revenues were overinflated anyways, and P2P downloading was the tool the market used to fight the collusion and let true market demand deflate the industry’s padded pockets.

So let’s call it even and focus on making the digital media experience what it should be.  A terabyte of free unified remote media storage for everyone accessible on all devices and operating systems.  Wifi access everywhere so we can stop strapping hard drives to our belts.  And for the love of Shawn Fanning, can somebody please build an integrated mobile device that works well so I can ditch my separate PDA, phone, multimedia player, and camera and free up some pocket space once and for all???