I did write a longish piece earlier today that gotten eaten when my browser died. I'll recap some of it below.

A few of weeks ago Matt and I debated whether the music industry would go after individual file swappers. Now it looks more than ever like it's going to happen, including possible jail time. Note that small-time traders are probably still in the clear, for now. But, some high-profile cases will lower the amount of trading that's happening.

From the standpoint of artists whose potential world-wide audience is large enough to support a career through sales of recorded music, but who can't attract a substantial enough crowd in most locations to justify traveling to perform there, this is a good thing. Such artists may have a lot to offer the relatively small audiences who are able to fully appreciate their work; they may speak so closely to the needs of those audiences that they are much more beloved than more mass-market fare. But, they should be paid if people are benefiting from their art. That way they can make more of it. But it can't happen if free trading via P2P ultimately precludes selling it. (This has not happened yet but could, as bandwidth and music encoding technology both improve...)

In that sense, ironically, these small-audience artists and the major labels are in the same boat. They both need to be able sell recorded music. So the activities of the majors, including the congressional lobbying and the legal actions against infringers, are arguably ultimately to the benefit of these artists, despite singer/songwriter Janis Ian's excellent article.

Her article, on the surface, implies the opposite. But musicians don't need free P2P swapping of all copyrighted works in order to reap the benefits Ian discusses -- namely that when people have the chance to hear good music via the Internet, they want to buy it. Artists just need the legal right to make some of their work available freely (or all of it available freely in a form that makes people still want to buy the original, perhaps due to quality issues). And the labels haven't been giving that legal right. That's the problem.

Of course, unsigned artists have no such problems. No one is constraining them from doing whatever they want with their music. This of course, points in a possible future direction for EM.

On another note, OS X users reading this blog might want to check out Chimera, which is the sweetest browser on the Mac today. It's built on the Mozilla rendering engine. The nightly build, which I recommend using, is at a beta level over 0.4 and under 0.5. But it's still very stable -- the only problem I have encountered is in using cut-and-paste on large text in a text input area. That one was a nuisance, since I had just written the aforementioned longish piece! But other than that, it is definately worth downloading. I also see that someone else today noted the cut & paste problem on the Chimera mail list so it will probably be fixed soon. I'd say overall it's approximately as stable as OmniWeb, my previous favorite browser. It looks about as good as OmniWeb (and much better than Mozilla), but has Mozilla's very nice tabbed browsing feature.
1:04:42 PM