I was riveted by the legal showdown over the song-swapping software Napster even before those Metallica millionaires started carping about losing their livelihood and their disgruntled fans began smashing CDs in protest. Beyond the drama, rhetoric and legal verdicts, I've become convinced the Napster case represents a transformative historical moment.

The way I see it, some 38 million Napster users toppled a central held-over fallacy from the Old Economy: that knowledge can comfortably be treated as a commodity. Let's face it. With populist power tools like Napster, digitized knowledge simply will not remain shrink-wrapped.