The idea that people shouldn't forward articles to one another has collapsed so completely that it's hard to remember when it was taken seriously. Years of dire warnings that violating the print model of copyright would lead to writers starving in the streets and render the Web a backwater of amateur content have come to naught. The quality of written material available on-line is rising every year. The lesson for the RIAA here is that old distribution models can fail long before anyone has any idea what the new models will look like. As with digital text, so now with music.
People have a strong preference for making unlimited perfect copies of the music they want to hear.
Napster now makes it feasible to do so in just the way the Web made it possible with text. Right now, no one knows how musicians will be rewarded in the future. But the lack of immediate alternatives doesn't change the fact that Napster is the death knell for the current music distribution system. The music industry does not need to know how musicians will be rewarded when this new system takes hold to know that musicians will be rewarded somehow. The RIAA-Napster suit feels like nothing so much as the fight over the national speed limit in the seventies and eighties.