It’s a dirty job, but does anyone have to do it? — dupe

On LinuxJournal, there is an editorial piece questioning the purpose of the RIAA and record companies as middle-men in distributing music: “Salon.com recently reported (quoting Webnoize) that peer-to-peer trading of copyrighted music hit an all-time high last month (August 2001) due to the popularity of Napster clones. Meanwhile, in Seoul, World Music Entertainment and Most Best Music won a lawsuit to the tune of about $75,000 against Soribada (a Korean P2P service) for violating copyrights. FastTrack, AudioGalaxy, iMesh and Gnutella are the top four facilitators of file trading.”