well i think the point of interest here is industry collusion, price-fixing, etc. there is more to free-market theory than 'what the market will bear', namely 'real competition'.

newspapers are important because democratic dialogue is important. but democratic dialogue is not a one-way broadcast from well-funded corporations to a passive citizenry with no venue to discuss or refute what is being broadcast. democracy is participatory; corporate-run news media are not. so to everyone who is waving an american flag to arouse public sympathy for these information monopolies - nigga please.

do you recognize the irony in your nay-saying word-of-mouth, bottom-up, crowdsourced content evaluation on one of the most prominent collaborative blogs on the internet, and one of the most successful examples of the very model you are dismissing?

i say this in every conversation regarding copyright, but now that the means of production and distribution of music are widely available and verging on free, the market is rapidly moving toward a state of being completely flooded with music, much of it quite good. the rock star artificial scarcity model is over - there are too many talented people giving away their music, and the numbers will only increase.

i feel that any of these conversations about the future of copyright vis a vis music is incomplete insofar as they do not touch the reliance of the music industry on an artificial scarcity which no longer exists. music is now easy and cheap to make and distribute, and indie artists are popping up like weeds and giving their music away for free - and a lot of it is very, very good. the industry can DRM the crap out of everything they own and make it impossible to use - it won't help them compete with an open culture in which most of the music is openly shared free of cost.

interestingly, this would seem to 'monetize' bittorrent/p2p traffic, suddenly putting it in the telecom's *interest* that users trade (huge volumes of) files. this has obvious political consequences for p2p/bittorrent, under the interpretation of politics as the interaction between governments and corporations' bottom lines.