You can be a Jedi or a Sith in the Star Wars online game, but you can't make music because of copyright concerns. So you can play a musician character, but only perform a few pieces of music. Sounds like a pretty boring job.

I'm not really sure why LucasArts and Sony Online wouldn't qualify as ISPs and therefore be able to avoid infringement liability through standard DMCA models. Allowing people to play individual notes, which they could in theory turn into infringing performances, seems a lot like allowing people to type individual letters, which they could in theory use to retell The Da Vinci Code in the game, the same way that performance artists recreated an episode of "Friends" in Quake. Am I missing something?

As a side note, I read this story because I personalized my Google page. I'm trying to figure out how Google changes the way schools and libraries should think about information provision, and how copyright law will influence or inhibit those changes. The basic question for me is, in a world where every hard drive is a library, what should the law say about libraries as distinct from other entities? (As Theodore Sturgeon asked: If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister?)