Since I am not going to convince you otherwise, my replying seems a waste of time. Let's try this from a different angle:

We are now back in time. Music is only available on vinyl disks. If you want one, you have to go buy one. If you have a friend who is generous and sharing, he lets you borrow his disks which you record for your own personal use on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Cumbersome, but it works. The quality degrades, but only once removed from the original vinyl it is still quite listenable.

You manage to acquire a vinyl pressing facility for dirt cheap and proceed to take purchased vinyl records and make bootleg copies of them. Selling them is a problem because of the shipping costs plus you actually have to come up with money to make them, and the fact that this is clearly stealing; you have goods - disks - that are not legal.

Fast forward a few years. We know have digitized media. All sorts. Protecting it from theft is quite impossible. Publishers try all kinds of things to protect themselves but to no avail. They ultimately have no alternative but to go after a minute % of those they can identify as egregiously illegally sharing copyrighted material they have no right to.

Your rant about unjust laws and tactics by publishers overlooks the fact that these tactics are in direct reaction to the downloading/sharing phenomenon that has undisputably taken money out of their pockets. I bet you would have to look long and hard for someone who was sued for making cassette copies of albums they owned so they could listen to them in their car.

Record comapanies have been screwing artists forever. It is their game. It is what they do. No artist is compelled to sign a contract with them, but most can't wait to do it anyway. Please explain how your position on the morality of taking something from media publishers without compensating them aids the plight of the poor artist whose labors you are enjoying for nothing?

"Getting back at The Man" as an excuse seems so 60's.

You can't be serious.

Are those things yours to share? If so, says who? The people who created them? I doubt it. if you are sharing something you got from another who got it from another, so there is no money or even perceived monetary loss to you or the friend who shared it with you in the first place, this makes it all moral? It is acceptable to pluck the fruit from the branch of a tree that reaches over your side of the fence, quite another to reach over the fence and snag what you know is not yours. How do you rationalize sharing that which you know was created by another at great cost without the permission of those who created it? The mind is a great thing. You can convince yourself that doing just about anything you can think of is OK.

You are making a very inaccurate comparison when you create an analogy between the physical world and the cyberworld.

If indeed, you had to find a Toyota gas station on a busy street corner only to find stations run by Ford, Honda, Chevy, and Subaru which you could not use on each corner, you would indeed be very inconvenienced at having to perhaps dig out your map and navigate your way to the nearest Toyota station.

Finding your way to either the Rhapsody or iTunes store requires nothing more than deciding which you prefer and clicking on the Favorite in your browser that takes you there.

True to form, the real rub that everyone has with Apple is that Steve Jobs figured out how to convince the music people that he could make them money for nothing as long as he could control what happened (within the music people's range of consent) to the music he let people download. Then, he had the genius to come up with the best software and music players ever conceived to make this appealing to consumers.

The comparison to Windows is commonplace, but that too is inaccurate. Windows dominates in spheres where there is no alternative. Enterprise software that millions of people HAVE to use is written for Windows applications. You can't use Mac or Linux to access many large corporation's vendor applications. It is just the way it is. Not 'fair' perhaps, but many things in life are not fair.

No one needs to buy a music player. No one has to buy an iPod. Having Apple operate as they do with iTunes harms no one. Don't like them? Buy something else. Can't compete with your piece of shit you are trying to sell? Come up with a better alternative! Is it reason enough that because they do something many people don't like that they should be forced to change their ways? If it was strictly altruistic, well maybe. But this has very little to do with altruism. This is about making money, and politicians bowing to whining business men who were/aren't as smart as the Apple folks.

Norway is just doing to Apple what they have been doing to their citizens for 50 years of Socialist Democratic rule; slowing down the aggressive, successful members of society so that the less aggressive, less successful members of their society don't get completely left in the dust. Not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it would seem their vision gets a little clouded.