The point I am trying to make is that just because we will finally have the box capable of storing the entire Library of Congress. . .they will make sure we don't get to, ever, for we will be dead by the time anything we see today gets old enough for the copyright to expire. Let's Follow The Money Some More Just a few months ago, the music industry completed record sales figures for any year in history, moving 1 billion of a combination of CDs, tapes, records and music videos, for a staggering $12 billion dollars. The response to this success, a few weeks ago, was for the music industry to propose, not a rebate to their customers but just the opposite, an additional 20 years during which the music industry could have a continued monopoly on that music, and. . .purely incidentally. . .this monopoly would also be extended to books, television, movies, video games and everything else that could be copyrighted. I think the only way to understand this is to put it in an elementary perspective such as this: Right now, you take your kid to see a movie, any movie the producers are releasing right now. Let's say your kid has been alive 5 years, under current law, that kid has to get to 80 years old before s/he can own a copy of that movie-- without the permission of the copyright holder. . .and the average age such kids can be expected to live is less than 80 years. . .thus making the copyright permanent for us or the kids we take to the movies. The same is true for all current copyrighted materials and the music industry is trying to add another 20 years to an already "life sentence". . .and this when their sales have just broken all records in history, if you will pardon the pun. . . . Since the founding of the United States when copyrights or patents were proposed by Thomas Jefferson for 17 years the period was lengthened to 28 years, plus another 28 years-- and most recently to 75 years for corporate copyrights and "life plus 50 years" for individual copyrights. That means that "Zen and the Art of the Internet," written by a 20 year old, who will be expected to live for another 55 years or so, will still be under copyright sentencing a century from now, and will be totally out of date and will be totally useless other than as a historical footnote. If this is the response of an industry that has just had a huge record bashing year of sales, a response not to lower prices but to raise them, then we are doing something in a backwards manner in the case of copyright. When car makers have really good years, or really bad ones for that matter, they work very hard to attract customers, with new innovations, more car for the money, financing on better terms, or whatever, and when they have record years they give their workers huge bonuses, which I am sure most of you have heard about recently, and they also compete in an aggressive manner to keep sales up.