I am not as astute as many of you re: internet use and filesharing etc but it seems to me that the recording industry efforts to stop music sharing will turn out to be futile. The internet as a system is so massive and elusive that it will be impossible to stop it all. A few will get sued, some sites will close, lawyers will make big bucks but the music sharing will go on. For eg. a simple response to the RIAA stopping Napster/Kazaa is to simply remote the server to a country that is inaccessible to US lawyers. Am I so far out with this idea? Surely a person could put a similar server in Timbukazistan and have some flunky keep it running over there, and be immune to lawyers??
As for users being sued, people tell me the technology is cheap and simple to have a untraceable internet address.
And if none of this works, all we need is a Yahoo chat list for music lovers. Post what you want and then email the files directly between participants.
It is possible that today's artists will discover that they will have to go back to the old days of being 'starving artists' which may benefit us all. If there is a drift from the money-devoted, commercialized "musicians" we have now, to the truly music-devoted artists of the past who really could make beautiful sounds then we will all be better off!
Seriously though, I doubt this file sharing will hurt them a penny. If I really like an artist I buy all their CD's, looking at the free files I have, I NEVER would have bought the whole CD, I would have gone without.