But Mike, wearen’t you a huge advocate of this a month ago? Why the sudden change in bias?

Sam, you misread Mike’s bias (which he hasn’t changed at all, even here.) What Mike wants (as I understand it,) and what most music industry customers want (again, as I understand it,) is a single music download service which offers the entire collection of every music label, in a DRM-free format (so that we can put it on a jukebox or burn it to disk, or put it in our personal or car MP3 players,) which offers songs we want at a reasonable price, and which rewards the musician for their work, not corporate stocks or middleman profit margins. Adding another, DRM-laden walled garden to the mix of the many download services with their own extremely limited selection, DRM-ridden, and over-priced music is not what the consumer wants, and sooner or later these services are all going to fail, and when they do, we’ll be right back where we started, though the RIAA will have more amunition as to why we are all evil and should be sued in order to increase the size of their wallets because we don’t have any interest in buying their product and want one that is more geared towards what the consumer (the person with the money and power) wants instead of what the RIAA wants.

When will the madness stop?

Mike, madness such as this is inherent in our species, and will always exist (at least until we nuke ourselves off the planet or an asteroid kills us all off.) Hopefully cooler, more intelligent heads will take over by driving the mad ones out of business, but I suspect that will be extremely difficult as the mad ones push for more and more laws to keep the cooler heads from putting them out of business. But sooner or later, just like Microsoft’s ultimate fall from power, cooler heads will prevail (hopefully before such nuclear or asteroid-caused annihilation.)