I discovered Napster last week

Until last week, I had never opened a music-sharing Web site. Prior to that I believed that people who shared music on the Internet were guilty of stealing. Very black and white. As in most life lessons, however, the intent of the lesson is not realized until it hits home in a personal way. I grew up in an era of individualism, where a property owner could cut down the trees or dam the creeks on their land. Now the public good is stronger in some areas than individual rights, and I think we are a better society for the restrictions we place on our own free will.

New ways of doing things and thinking about things are uncomfortable, but when you get what you want it's hard to resist change. I have seen the future, and it is free.

Those former days were populated with companies whose intellectual properties were trade secrets in a cold war of industrial spies and corporate soldiers. Now “connectivity” is the byword, open systems link competitors to customers, and rugged individualism is a Web site. My MP3 experience consisted of entering the name of a song that I've been trying to locate since the late 1970s by a band that made only one hit on a label that rose and fell in the space of a few years. The song did not exist on any search engine, record catalog, or “Hits of the 60s” collection that I could find, but it has been playing in my head for 20 years. In 15 minutes, I was listening to a song from my childhood in its full 128-bit/s fidelity. And I got it; I understood. By being allowed to access private collections worldwide, I was plugged into the RAM of the human experience. The restrictive entertainment delivery mechanisms of the 20th century are giving way to unrestricted flow of information that is an agreement between artist and audience, between creator and consumer, between ISP/ASP architectures and demand economics. Recent settlements between entertainment monoliths and scrappy dot com service providers show that change is inevitable. We are becoming linked in a new world order, and our watchword is “open platform, shared resource, gigabit gratification.” Gary Evan Jensen, Associate Editor