At the beginning of each fall term, Benn Konsynski, a professor of decision and information analysis at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, holds an Annual Academic Year CEO Panel. The 2003 session's title was "Here Be Pirates! Facing the Music: Issues in the Transformation of the Music Industry." The panel consisted of a diverse mix of music industry experts, each of whom shared his views on the cataclysmic effects illegal Internet downloading is having on this beleaguered market sector.

Estimates of how much music CD sales have suffered from Internet piracy in the last three years vary from about 14% to the figure most of the panelists used -- 30%. National estimates say some 60 million Americans regularly "pirate" copyrighted music online, a practice that's costing the industry at least $700 million in lost CD sales annually.

While they rarely agreed on how to solve the problem, everyone on the panel - representing composers, artists, lawyers and entrepreneurs - agreed that digital music file swapping is shaking the industry to its very core, and is radically altering a financial model that has thrived for decades.

The Views from Inside

Mike McQuary, a co-founder of Mindspring and now a partner in Brash Music, a music services company that develops new artists, began with an insightful overview: "It's old wine in new bottles: the issues surrounding intellectual property and royalties and artists' getting their due haven't changed. What's changed is the way all that stuff is packaged and the willingness or non-willingness of people to adapt to it. Those 261 people who were recently hit by RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] lawsuits are all probably guilty ... however, the genie is out of the bottle, and you're not going to get the genie back in the bottle by chasing down a bunch of people with $10,000