A s I opened the streamlined, immaculate white box in which it arrived last week, I felt like I must be the last person on Earth or at least in Silicon Valley to get an iPod . Fortunately it was an iPod Mini, which is still considered the best-looking digital music player in the world today. Of course, I'd played with iPods before, but using one as my primary music player revealed some benefits and limitations of which I wasn't previously aware.

A recent business school study has provided the first substantive proof that "Internet music piracy not only doesn't hurt legitimate CD sales, it may even boost sales of some types of music." Or so it claims. The research, conducted by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina, does show that CD sales can withstand extensive contemporaneous file sharing,