The classic response to change involves desperate fears about control. How will we control who reads the Bible? How will we control where people travel? How will we control who can interpret the Dead Sea Scrolls? How will we control people's acquisition of recorded music?
And the answer to these fears requires not a greater, stronger, firmer grip on controls, but requires us to learn from the change a new way of thinking about communication, about transportation, about interpretation, about digital information.
For instance, some academic administrators responded to the first wave of mainstream technological change entailed hiding from the Web, lest someone do something illegal or doctrinally incorrect in their webspace.
The impulse to tighten controls, to crack down, to prevent risk is just the response that the world of accelerating change will defeat, every time---as theological authorities and record companies ought to have figured out by now.
"If we burn a few more Lollards, maybe it'll provide a disincentive for those rascally translators!"
Even if the recording-industry oligopolists successfully drive Napster underground, that's all they will have done. There are today various ways to exchange files online different from that the Napster protocols Shawn Fanning devised a couple of years ago; by the time the recorded music industry stifles the next method of peer-to-peer file sharing, the ways of sharing music online will have multiplied even further.
While the record companies (and many musicians) shout "Piracy!" it's worth stepping back for a moment and remember that the industry of recording particular performances and selling the recordings developed from a distinct set of technologies, a set of technologies which themselves transformed the economic processes through which musicians made their livings. (More to the point, they didn't transform the ways most musicians make their living; they transformed the fortunes of a select few, improved the lot of a moderate number of intermediate-level musicians, and simply seduced and deceived a tremendous number of musicians who still make their livings just by waiting on tables or working in graphic arts houses, or who don't make a living at all.)
"The history of the record industry is an aspect of the general history of the electrical goods industry, and has to be related to the development of radio, the cinema, and television. The new media had a profound effect on the social and economic organization of entertainment so that, for example, the rise of record companies meant the decline of the music publishing and piano making empires, shifting roles for concert hall owners and live-music promoters."-- Simon Frith, "The Industrialization of Popular Music," in Popular Music and Communication, James Lull, ed., (NY: Sage) 1992, p. 51.