Taking heart from legislators like Coleman, a new nonpartisan political organization called Click the Vote, headed by digital entertainment veteran John Parres, has just emerged to focus a spotlight on, among other things, "the copyright industry infringing upon personal freedom, consumer rights and the efficacy of the Internet [and its] heavy-handed use of the judicial system ... all in the name of security and defending the rights of copyright holders."

Morality and legality notwithstanding, an awful lot of smart people think suing customers is just plain stupid for an industry that is, after all, just selling entertainment. Attorney and author James F. Haggerty expressed this in a recent USA Today editorial.

"They relied on the long-established legal mantra, 'protect our intellectual property at any cost,' with little thought to that tactic's public effects," he wrote, noting in the short run that the campaign would probably reduce unauthorized file sharing. "But suing their own customers? A customer base largely made up of cynical teens and twentysomethings already skeptical of hyper-aggressive corporate greed? In this media age, legal maneuvers that once worked so well behind courtroom doors can have embarrassing long-term consequences now that they're under the glare of the public spotlight."

As a result, a once compliant media turned its attention to horror stories of a multi-billion dollar industry suing cyber-averse grandparents and preteens living in subsidized housing for potentially millions of dollars each. Industry mouthpiece Billboard complained about the media coverage in October.

"Recent news coverage of piracy lawsuits has been unfairly critical of the record industry. That a few teenagers have been involved in the cases is beside the point. The real issue is that downloading copyrighted music is stealing, pure and simple."

The only thing wrong with this statement is everything: people are being sued for uploading (making songs available on the network) not downloading (retrieving songs from the network), file-sharing may be copyright infringement but it isn't stealing, and the term "piracy" generally refers to activity that makes money from other people's copyrights, like say, making and selling counterfeit CDs, not sharing music files over the Internet.

Why Pay?

If music is still available for free via the file-sharing services, why pay at all? The most practical advantage the pay services have is the user experience on the free services. As Apple's Steve Jobs said recently, "You type in a song name, you don't get back a song - you get a hundred, on a hundred different computers. You try to download one and ... the person has a slow connection, and it craps out. And after two or three have crapped out, you finally download a song, and four seconds are cut off because it was encoded by a ten-year-old." Don't forget the pop-up ads and spyware, the moral ambiguity of unauthorized file-sharing, and the fact that you may get sued.