Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elvis & P2P

Word is that Michael Jackson might have to sell his ownership of rights to the back catalogue of Beatles and Elvis tracks to bail himself out of financial difficulties. Jackson owns half of Sony/ATV Music which owns the rights to 200,000 songs, which includes the Jackson-owned Beatles and Elvis catalogues. Sony's publishing business is worth in the region of $1 billion, 50 percent of which is attributable to Michael Jackson, himself reported to be worth somewhere around $150 million.

Apparently.

It beggars The Antagonist's belief that this continued assumption of ownership of vibrations in the airwaves, and the huge sums of money associated with so doing, can continue when anyone with a TV, radio, or PC and Internet connection can readily avail themselves of those very same vibrations.

Sure, a centralised bunch of media companies can wave around lots of bits of paper containing all sorts of legal jargon which implies ownership of everything ever recorded, but they can't really argue with a world-wide, decentralised, fully-redundant world of half-a-billion Internet users, who account for up to 85% of all Internet traffic, and who are all actively asserting a rather different paradigm.

Evidence shows they still haven't quite got it yet.