They exchange songs of luminous beauty for a lengthy, lazy hoedown that one "y'all" after another cannot render authentic.
Under the agreement, users of the Napster service will be allowed to exchange songs to which TVT owns the copyrights.
The survey found that Argentina, Spain and Brazil also had a higher percentage of online users exchanging songs on Napster than was the case in the United States.
Still, the report found that the United States had by far the highest absolute number of users during February, with around 13.5 million people exchanging songs via home computers.
This time, however, most of the signs are that free music may win, man.Napster's software allows users to exchange songs directly, matching them up by maintaining a central who's-got-which-song database.
Sharman Networks Ltd., a company based in Australia, said it had purchased the core assets of KaZaA, a Dutch Internet music service that has angered record labels by allowing users to exchange songs freely.
The Recording Industry Association of America and several recording companies and musicians argue that Napster and other Web services that allow people to exchange songs as MP3 files break copyright laws and deny musicians compensation for their work.
One of the finest moments comes in the Christmas 1914 scene, when the entrenched British and Germans exchange songs and presents: the German rendering of Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht brings a lump to the throat, which is immediately checked by the lewd British response of Christmas Day in the Cookhouse.
Record companies in the United States and Europe, facing wide criticism that they have fallen behind in technology, have said they cannot afford to emulate KaZaA and services like it, which allow users to exchange songs for free over the Internet through their home computers.
The operator of the KaZaA music-swapping service plans to announce a partnership today with one of Europe's major Internet access providers in a deal that underscores their mutual benefit from a method of exchanging songs that has raised the ire of record companies worldwide.
