That particular Pulp Fiction dialogue is on the soundtrack, so I guess a lot of people know it by heart. I have the DVD (gasp! I actually bought it!) and the screenplay and there was one stage after watching the film about 30 times when I could have recited 98% of the script.

But back to the subject at hand....Does anybody remember the class in business school where they tell you that the best way to run a company is to declare all out war on your customers? No, I don't either. But that's what the recording industry is doing. Shooting itself in the foot, slowly but surely, a bullet through each toe.

A pattern has been established: Napster arrived on the scene and was shut down. Users moved to Fastrack and Audiogalaxy , which in turn have been subjected to legal action. Gnutella has inherited much of this user base and is now under attack. If the authorities do manage to topple Gnutella, I have no doubt whatsoever that an alternative will be up an running within weeks or months.

As the birth of Gnutella demonstrated, a new protocol can be established very quickly if developers are mobilised and these tactics by the MPAA and RIAA in conjunction with the recording industry will provoke exactly that - a large scale mobilisation of P2P developers spurred on by irritated users. It's a natural law, that when one source ceases to deliver, people will look for another; and where there's demand there will be a supply.

Think of the situation in almost any large town or city in the world, where there is always at least one neighbourhood occupied by drug dealers. At some point, the police will do a series of raids and on rare occasions will succeed in cleaning up the area, at which time the dealers will shift to another zone and continue business as usual with 0 effect on the local drug market. Why? Because the authorities have not tackled the root of the problem.

In the case of music piracy, the root problem is simple: Overpricing.

For the studio I work in, we often make a 1000 copies (professionally printed with full colour inlays) of the CDs we record for around $1000 and we then sell them for $5-6 (at least 400% profit). In Europe, new-release commercial CDs cost $17-20. This price, even taking into account national / international distribution, promotion and intermediaries is excessive, to say the least.