It's a good thing we banned Xerox machines 30 years ago or all book publishers would have gone out of business.

The same goes for the U.S. government's wise decision to ban cassette recorders and VCRs, saving the music recording industry and Hollywood from certain extinction.

Oh, wait. Something's wrong. We didn't ban those things.

Despite that, the publishing and recording industries are more profitable than ever. Hollywood also seems to have scraped by.

But according to the recording industry's view in the current Internet music downloading controversy, Napster threatens the very foundations of civilization. Napster (www.napster.com) allows people to trade their music collections via the Internet.

I'm not the one to ask about rock, heavy metal, hip-hop, rap or whatever the current "in" stuff is. My taste runs to Bach, Buxtehude, Bessie Smith and Thelonius Monk. I have an LP collection (yes, vinyl platters) that, together with FM radio and a few CDs, satisfies my home musical appetite.

Even if it were available online, downloading a gazillion bytes of baroque at modem speeds doesn't appeal to me. So I ignored the entire downloadable music scene until my curiosity got the better of me.

Oh my.

I haven't been so pleasantly surprised since I visited the town of Mojo in southern Ethiopia and pondered whether it was related to Muddy Waters' "I Got My Mojo Workin'." Which I just downloaded via Napster and am listening to as I type. I once was lost, but now I'm found: I'm a confirmed napster.

But the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) feels so threatened by the availability of music downloads on the net that it is attacking it on every legal front. CD sales, say the recording moguls, are down at retail shops near universities, where students use their free high-speed Internet connections to gobble up tons of what passes for music these days.

It hasn't occurred to them that students buy CDs for $13 on the net (still over-priced) rather than $18 at the local store. There were millions of music downloads last year and CD sales are higher than ever.

The FTC estimates that U.S. consumers paid $480 million more than they should have for CDs over the last three years, because of record companies' price fixing in restraint of trade. (See www.ftc.gov/opa/2000/05/cdpres.htm.)

Those thieves are happy to stick it to you, and the law be damned. But they're quick to yell "copyright infringement" when the record label sticks on the other foot. "The artists are being cheated out of their property!" their sharks shout (with some difficulty, their jaws stuffed with the ill-gotten gains of extortionate pricing).

How much of the price of a $15 CD do you think the companies give to the artist? Except for the superstars, zilch, zippo, nada, bubkes. Like the old coal-mining company towns, artists must sell their souls to the company store.

What the companies fear is that entertainers may decide to sell direct to their fans on the net for 25 cents a tune, make some money and cut the companies out.

Shed tears for the recording industry's meager $15 billion earnings?

I say to them, as Bessie Smith sang in her 1930's hit, "Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer, and I don't care."

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