It's High Noon at the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, April 3, as Napster's Hank Barry, RIAA's Hilary Rosen, and of course, Ted Nugent testify at a hearing on online entertainment. Napster fans marching to the hearing from D.C.'s Union Station.

In the NY Times Mag, Rob Walker suggests the recording industry could cozy up to downloadable music the way book publishers did to paperbacks, or the movie moguls did to videos. Downloaded music could be paperback music -- published six months after the album debuts on CD, without all that great packaging, and with MP3, not CD quality (they ain't the same!). Would you pay $9 for a downloadable album instead of $18 for the real McCoy?

As if to prove Lawrence Lessig's contention that the copyright industry operates on two fronts -- code plus law -- comes this story from the LA Times that the RIAA is looking for Internet security firms to help them hack gnutella. There's no shortage of companies willing to take Hollywood's money, but can it be done?

Consilient today released the Consilient Sitelet Technology Platform. Sitelets are "portable interactive process containers" which allow complex business processes to be broken down into components. Look for Andy Oram's upcoming profile of Consilient on openP2P.com.

The prospect of righteous Napster users marching on Washington pales in comparison with the great leaders and speakers who have done the same. What if Mario Savio were addressing this demonstration instead of Shawn Fanning? What might he have said?

Late last year I reviewed the release of Netscape 6, in which I decided however pretty it was, it wasn't quite ready for prime time. It's been five months since then and I'm regretting ever installing it on my machine.

Lucas Gonze, formerly of WorldOS, sends in these meanderings on XMLP and SOAP. Lucas wonders why it shouldn't be built on SOAP, and why Microsoft supports SOAP, while Sun is against it.

AudioMill says it can search internet radio stations for song titles you are interested in, and then download that song to your computer. Interesting idea, but the quality of streaming audio only lies between 40 and 128kps, and the fact that you can't turn their format into MP3's or burn them to a CD may turn off a good number of their target audience.

DCI's Summit on Peer-to-Peer, subtitled "Expanding and Enabling Enterprise Computing," is a quiet affair concluding today in San Francisco. With roughly 50 attendees at the sessions, and about a dozen exhibitors, one gets the strong sense that it's too early -- perhaps *way* too early -- for a pure business P2P conference. The current economic climate certainly doesn't help matters, but for now P2P is the still the province of programmers, techies, and wild-eyed visionaries.

The record companies are running about with arms flapping wildly in the air to get filenames to Napster to be filtered. Because of a major loophole in the injunction, there needn't be any changes users obtain MP3's if everyone were to use my simple filenaming/directory structure.