The recent acquisition of OD2 by Loudeye presents the potential for a wholesale service to provide innovative technology and content in a business model that is prospectively profitable. At center stage, Loudeye's Sonic Selector will be available to all music retailers in Europe. It will allow uses to stream chosen tunes for 1 pence per track. This a la carte option for streaming contrasts with both iTunes/Napster downloads (at 99 cents per track) and Rhapsody services ("all you can eat" streaming for $9.99 per month.)

Many have suggested that government should institute a system to garner revenues from levies on internet service providers or equipment manufacturers, and so compensate rights owners for takings through peer-to-peer. This would presumably allow peer-to-peer to continue unchallenged. Little careful economic analysis has gone into estimating the correct number or perceiving the real consequences.

Among the many shortcomings of government schemes to collect copyright revenues, it is difficult to imagine how government could determine what new technologies (such as Loudeye's or Microsoft's prospective Janus) are presented to retailers. Free market forces provide the incentives for new innovation but necessarily implicate the protection of property rights to preserve those same incentives.

What advocates of free takings might not then understand is that peer-to-peer takings of copyrighted music take market share not only from catalog recordings, but also from competing new technologies that are now shaping the music industry and digital marketplace.