As part of the deal, the labels and artists should give Napster the responsibility for creating a mechanism to repay artists. Yes, this may all sound a tad too pat. Getting the record labels to agree on anything is tricky. Throw Bill Gates and bigfoot Microsoft into the mix, and it gets trickier still. And despite its recent entreaties to the labels, Napster could still end up as permanently damaged goods due to the court-imposed filtering.
Technological hurdles remain, too.
Connections are there, and the reliability is there. But a lot of this is still evolving and being installed. But given time, I'm willing to bet that a system similar to the one I describe will emerge on its own, anyway. The Internet is a powerful force for enabling customer choice. And the big labels resist it at their own peril.