Consumers have moved rapidly to adopting digital formats for consuming entertainment-related content. The most obvious example of this is music and video downloads, with Apples iTunes and YouTube as leading examples. Apple has sold more than one billion songs via its iTunes music store and it continues to demonstrate a spectacular rate of growth. Over 30,000,000 individuals have purchased an iPod portable music device, and tens of millions of other consumers use one of dozens of other portable devices to listen to music. Other platforms for listening to music are equally successful, and in the case of Microsofts Windows Media Player even more dominant with over 90,000,000 systems running the software globally. Real Networks Rhapsody, and Yahoo! Music represent other major entrants in this space. In addition to those companies selling licensed music downloads for a fee, peer-to-peer networks such as Limewire and Morpheus claim to have tens of millions of users sharing music and other files on a continual basis.
As consumers have become comfortable purchasing (and stealing) music online, they are now beginning to download other digital forms of entertainment, including...