The battle is not over yet.

The RIAA, MPAA, ESRB, and DMCA all need to be dismantled as they protect nobody but themselves. Thier interest is only to make more money off of consumers.

The power and control these organizations (and laws) have over normal people's access to media and creative content is ridiculously extreme.

They screw artists out of their profits and they screw consumers out of their hard earned cash.

This is why I will always circumvent any of this DRM crap that I buy. Region codes, macrovision, CSS, DRM, and watermarks are all offensive to my rights to "fair use". I strip that stuff out whenever I can.

And Sony/BMG should really be ashamed of themselves for the trojan horse rootkit tech they had in their DRM software. You think I as a consumer want to do business with a company that wants to hack my computer? They should suffer for their crimes.

Wow, it's about time someone figured out that DRM is meaningless, easily defeated, and just makes some people WANT to screw you.

If "Napster" taught us anything, it taught us that the demand for music and video is huge. Geeks would go to extraordinary lengths to "share" it.

If "iTunes" taught us anything, it's that when given a legitimate market (although a hobbled one) people would indeed buy millions of copies of ... just about anything.

Steve Job is right: it isn't copy-protection that is driving legitimate sales to its store; it's demand. All that copy-protection is doing, all that it has ever done, is get in the way.

Most significantly, with electronic distribution the cost-of-goods-sold is essentially zero. It's all profit. No warehousing, no shipping, no blankety-blank plastic discs in blankety-blank plastic boxes with BLANKETY-BLANK TAPE THAT YOU CAN'T GET OFF ;-) on the edge. Nothing but money in the bank.

The music industry has fought everything that was good for it ... radios in cars, cassette tapes, CD-burners, digital tape, you name it. But it can't ignore the profit-margins that it is getting from its entire vast catalog by means of the Internet.

Whether they believe it or not, there are tens of millions of honest folks out there who love music and who want to receive it electronically. Your market hasn't dried up... it is now bigger and more profitable than you ever dreamed it could be.