Sylvia,

The Internet has caused an incredible rash of applications for everything from patent applications, book registrations for copyrights, pamphlets, songs, etc. If you have seen those commercials about "Registering your ideas for inventions" you get an idea of how widespread it is. For people to run those kinds of ads on mainstream television they are doing a ton of business. Those ads cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There are approximately 30 million artists on the Internet. If you took just a few percent of those people, say 5 million, with those people filing for a percentage of songs, CD's, etc. you have probably 25 million songs easily. Since this subject is everywhere these days, how long do you think it takes to process those. And in addition, you have the applications from the past which are paper applications being updated to computer.

It is quite frankly mind boggling. How fast do you think technology travels. It triples about every month in how many people are involved. 5 years ago is a different era. Just like last month.

MAB