Federal regulators this month are expected to adopt controversial rules requiring new technology in electronics products to prevent digital TV shows from being traded on the Internet the way some music is shared today.

Of more than 18,000 students surveyed, 38 percent said they had lifted material from the Internet for use in papers in the last year. 44 percent said they considered this sampling no big deal.

"I'm not sure it's shifted values yet, but for a lot of students, it's heading in that direction."

In fact, for many people, that shift has already come.

Micropayments, small digital payments of between a quarter and a fraction of a penny, made (yet another) appearance this summer with Scott McCloud's online comic, The Right Number, accompanied by predictions of a rosy future for micropayments.

To read The Right Number, you have to sign up for the BitPass micropayment system; once you have an account, the comic itself costs 25 cents.

BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn't fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.