Letting go for profit. Paul Boutin's written a fantastic piece in Salon on the music industry's only possible successful strategy for making money with online music: Giving up on copy-protection.
Likewise, the industry needs to let go of attempts to impose Byzantine copy-protection schemes on consumers, as suggested by the SSSCA bill being drafted by Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C. Remember the complicated copy-protection schemes on software floppies? We can only imagine the number of profit-killing phone calls to customer support: "It won't play." My own attempts to use MusicNet's beta were frustrating, clearly because of code designed to stop me from playing music not covered by the terms of my subscription, a technical feat much harder to pull off than just letting me go ahead.
