This week I got a new toy. The iPod is Apple Computing's entry in the fast-growing market of portable MP3 players. These devices are comparable in size and purpose to a Sony Walkman, but play digital audio files rather than CDs or tapes.

I love the iPod. Like every Apple product since the iMac, it looks more like candy than technology. It has great sound quality. It has a big display screen and a shuttle-style control that lets me scroll through all the songs I have in my digital collection.

But the best thing about the iPod is its wrapper -- a thin plastic film printed with the message "Don't Steal Music" in five languages and three alphabets.

Who is Apple kidding? The iPod has a whopping five gigabytes of storage space. That's enough to fit about 1,400 songs in the highly compressed MP3 format. Or more than 100 CDs.

I could spend the week converting my collection of Broadway show tunes into MP3 form. But I suspect that most iPod users are, like me, filling their players with MP3s downloaded from the Internet. You know -- stolen.

It's the fastest, most efficient way of filling up all that memory. And Apple knows it.

But the technology industry is still in a state of denial about the impact of digital audio on copyright. Don't Steal Music, says Apple -- covering its legal bases so it doesn't antagonize record companies like Sony, BMG Entertainment and Warner Music.

These are the companies that got the Recording Industry Association of America to sue Napster, a popular service for exchanging MP3s over the Internet. They shut down Napster's system because neither artists nor labels saw any proceeds from files traded by Napster users.

Fair enough.

Except that Sony produces a "Memory Stick" MP3 player in addition to all those recordings.

Warner Music is owned by Time Warner AOL. AOL's shopping portal has some great deals on MP3 players, just in time for Christmas.

BMG is part of the German company Bertelsmann, which was an early investor in AOL. That was back in the days when AOL offered its own Napster-like MP3 search engine.

They're just trying to keep up with the digital marketplace -- a marketplace that is willing to pay for an easy, low-cost way of finding, storing and listening to music.

A marketplace in which information services are valuable, but information itself is abundant and, therefore, cheap to the point of being essentially worthless.

And whether it's stored as sound waves or bits, music is just information.

The economy of the Internet is based on finding innovative ways of packaging information, ways that genuinely add value for the consumer. I'll happily pay for a service that makes it easy to find MP3s, keeps my MP3s labelled and organized, and guarantees me quick, trouble-free downloads.

But pay for the music itself? No way -- any more than I'd pay to read a book on screen. What I pay for is the service of having the book printed, bound and placed on a display table where I can find it.

There is an upside to an economy of information abundance: access.

Imagine a world in which any one can read any book, hear any song or watch any movie -- anytime, anywhere, for free.

We're almost there.

In fact, information will be so abundant that we're going to need some really experienced companies to organize all those songs, words and images. Companies like Sony, Time Warner or Apple.

These companies like to hide behind the products -- sorry, artists -- that they market, arguing that artists are the real victims of free information exchange.

But artists will get paid for the digital distribution of their work -- just as soon as record companies, publishing houses and movie producers start offering distribution services worth paying for.

In fact, the first thing I did after unwrapping my iPod was to visit Audible.com, a distributor of digital audio books. Sure, I could find at least some of those books in the form of free MP3 downloads. But Audible offers a better selection and faster downloads -- though sadly, not for iPod users.

So please, Apple, don't lecture me about stealing music. Those tracks weren't stolen. They were liberated.

Alexandra Samuel is a Vancouver-based technology writer and consultant.