My Two-Bit Opinion #1: The Whole Napster/RIAA Crap
It's war.
I'm a Napster user, but both sides are right and both sides are wrong. The Big Problem is that when you apply economic structures to an artistic arena, you get side effects, mutations and losses. Imagine trying to squeeze a sphere into a square; they're objects of completely different shapes and dimensions. Commerce is a graph - supply and demand, profit and expense, credit and debit. Art is multidimensional, encompassing universes of expression - poetry, theatre, music. In a perfect world, Art wouldn't be a commodity, but it has to be so that artists can keep creating without having to worry about real jobs in our commerce-driven society. Creating art shouldn't be a job in the first place. It should be the expression of inspiration. Try applying that to a 9 to 5 schedule and prepare to be slowly driven insane*.
Faction 1: Napster Users
We're thieves. By the laws in our society, we are taking things that we did not create and have offered nothing of ourselves in exchange. Copyrighted works are the intellectual property of artists and their representative companies (unfortunately it is more often the latter than the former who controls these rights), and nothing is being exchanged for their property. Regardless of your views on property (personally I find it preposterous that land and music can be "owned"), we must defer to the laws we've made, or else change them. The definition of "commodity" is "something useful that can be turned to commercial or other advantage." Napster users are getting something useful for nothing and this violates an unfortunate but universal economic law: Nothing is free.
Faction 2: The RIAA
They're bloodsuckers. They could care less about financial compensation for their artists. Any attempts from them at garnering sympathy for their financial losses should be met with ferocious silence. The paradoxical implications of their cries are staggering, and could possibly unravel the fabric of the universe. After all, you pay $15 for a CD and the artist, if they're lucky, gets maybe a $1 of that (nevertheless a very important dollar). The label executives are businessmen, and their business is changing. Businessmen don't like change, so they will fight with whatever tools and strategies their surprisingly fertile minds can conjure. For far too long they have been in control - spoon feeding the world their glossily packaged crap and leading those citizens who are enticed by shiny things down the plastic primrose paths of mediocrity. Which is fine, because the vast majority of the population don't care about great art or music anyway.
Industry Paradigms
What I would like to offer to the debate is the overlooked fact that the music industry paradigm has changed a great deal in the last 40 years and it is ready to change again. People forget that in the Fifties the industry was based around singles. 45s of one or two songs were the mode of the day. LP albums were invented by weasely keen record executives who noticed that kids were getting more money to spend, so they figured that if people want a song badly enough, they will buy 10 other songs they haven't heard and pay five times as much money to get it.
Think about it. You heard Smash Mouth's "Walking on the Sun." Maybe you liked it enough to pay $15 for a CD with 12 other songs you hadn't heard. You figured the rest of the tracks had to be pretty similar, right? Those of you who own this record know that every other track on that CD is uptempo punk/ska. Absolutely no trace of songs similar to their groovy hit single. You paid for 12 tracks you did not want. Sucker. The RIAA strikes another blow for the P.T. Barnum Theory of Temporal Economics.
Maybe the argument could be made that you liked a song enough to pay $15. Value is often defined by what some people are willing to pay. I know there are songs that, in some personal economic vacuum, are priceless to me. But as I said earlier, music is multidimensional and commerce is graphic, so there's no easy correlation of the two. We need to determine the market value of one song.
This is where Napster is leading the fight back to the singles method of record sales. Yes, singles are widely available, but if you want one song out of 15 tracks and you pay $15, shouldn't one track be worth $1? Most singles go for $3 - $4 or so, almost a third the price of the CD. This is not an economically balanced equation.
Some way needs to be devised to pay the $1 or less for the one song you want. No doubt the record companies are looking into this already. It's just a matter of time before some economically sensible method of compensation is devised. Remember, never underestimate the financial craftiness of the Record Industry. They get paid because they know how to squeeze money from people.
Until then, download to you heart's content and consider the money lost to be a casualty of war, if you can stomach the guilt of pillaging. I for one can't. If you must pilfer, steal crap! Have no remorse whatsoever for downloading Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys tracks. They're not artists anyway; they're record company cash cows and they're the reason the RIAA is worried about Napster in the first place. If you actually care about music, then chances are good that you care about the people who make it. You should support your favorite musicians as best you can, so that they don't have to resort to a life of crime (or business) to keep making great music. Purchase their music legally (pennies are better than nothing), and for pete's sake, go see live music concerts and buy t-shirts as much as you can, because that's where artists actually get paid.
* People who work in advertising, can I get an Amen?