My skepticism over whether the post-copyright era will ever arrive was actually the heart of my original critique of Barlow, and I'm not yet ready to abandon it. Much has been said about decentralized bootlegging mechanisms (e.g., Gnutella) that are harder to police than Napster. And Krugman notes that locating Napster offshore would also complicate policing. All true. But if the government decides to wage war against copyright violation, it will have a fighting chance. One approach would be to nab individual violators—people who obtain copyrighted material via Gnutella (or via an offshore Napster) and perhaps, where feasible, even the people who make such material available. It is easy to imagine "sting" operations that would locate thousands of such people in no time flat. (You could notify them of their $5,000 fine by e-mail, and if they contested the charge they could have their day in court.) The outcome of the ensuing cops-vs.-robbers technological arms race—involving encryption, anonymizers, and so on—is beyond my capacity to predict, but the mere fact of a dogged government enforcement effort would deter many people from even playing the game.

And bear in mind, as I pointed out in that 1996 Slate column, that the cost of obtaining intellectual property legitimately could drop considerably, thus reducing the temptation to get it illegally. As record companies start selling music over the Web routinely, and try to keep charging CD prices, they may run into resistance from consumers, who will see that the marginal cost of producing each additional copy of a song is close to zero (especially as the cost of server space and bandwidth keeps dropping). And any such consumers' rebellion would be abetted by the existence of sites like garageband.com, where good music can be had for free. Meanwhile, over in the world of books, the economics of "publishing" and distributing E-books allows an author to sell a book for a couple of dollars. With prices this low, would many people find cheating worth the trouble if the government was working hard to, at the very least, stigmatize it?

In that 1996 column, I imagined the costs of legitimately obtaining intellectual property eventually dropping much more than they've dropped so far. And I didn't anticipate the ease with which people would someday be able to illegitimately locate and acquire intellectual property; that is, I didn't anticipate Napster or Gnutella. Still, it remains eminently conceivable that, depending on how laws, law-enforcement techniques, and norms evolve, the various kinds of costs associated with illegitimate acquisition will make legitimate acquisition the preferred alternative for almost everyone.