On Saturday night, my friend and I discussed the prospect of rushing the field at Beaver Stadium if Penn State had managed to slay the Goliath that is Ohio State.

Unfortunately, we never got the chance. But during the discussion, my friend brought up a classic point: There are 20,000 of us, and there's no way the cops could stop us all. This point, like communism, works in theory but is generally poorly executed. It's every man for himself, and once the mace starts flying, that 20,000 will drop to 2,000.

But while that ideal wouldn't have worked on Saturday, it's been working for years on the Internet in the form of illegal MP3 sharing. It's become commonplace to illegally download music, and the piracy is so rampant that the collective heads of the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Big Four (the four record companies that control more than 80 percent of American music) are spinning.

The method of choice to this point has been simple in every sense of the word: plain, guileless, naïve and ignorant (hat tip to m-w.com). Early this month, a federal jury levied $220,000 against a 30-year-old single mother in Minnesota for sharing a whopping 24 songs. Apparently, music is now worth $9,166.67 per song. I mean, "Crank That" is good and all, but that's a little extreme.

The RIAA's misguided lawsuits against individuals have been well-publicized, but more recently, its minions have come down hard on a music sharing institution: OiNK's Pink Palace, a UK-based tracker for BitTorrents, which in layman's terms are big files that usually contain a large collection of MP3s. The format is highly convenient for music albums and 100+ song mixes.

OiNK, as it's more commonly referred to, had an active membership of 80,000 people worldwide and was responsible for the international leakage of more than 60 major album releases in 2007 alone. Needless to say, this was not a 30-year-old single mother. This is serious business.

But even though the RIAA has earned a victory with the takedown of a top-level music piracy network, it's still got a long battle ahead. And the battle, because of the Internet's "one for all, and all for one" attitude, seems impossible to win.

In fact, even with OiNK down and the possibility that the International Criminal Police Organization will begin targeting individual users of the site, the blogosphere is stepping up to the plate. Technorati, a site that indexes more than 94 million blogs, yields an overload of search results pointing to OiNK alternatives. The most popular one in the works is BOiNK, a replacement made by BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

It's readily apparent that it doesn't matter what the RIAA does; people realize that there are 80,000 fans who won't back down to the mace. The only crime more widespread than illegal downloading is jaywalking.

Clearly, people don't think they should have to throw down 15 bucks for a CD that may or may not completely suck. There's a lot of music I've listened to that I've never deemed worthy of purchasing, and there's plenty of music I've illegally downloaded, only to go out of my way to walk to City Lights Records and throw down the cash for the album. Studies have shown that people who download music are the most likely people to buy CDs.

The RIAA continues to push the issue with illegal downloading, but instead of coming up with a novel way to circumvent it, it's using litigation to attack its most valuable customers. Sounds like a good business strategy.

Ben Franklin did a great thing for the world when he came up with the idea of a lending library. It put public education and a free exchange of culture at the fingertips of all Americans, no matter how much money they had to drop on the new Mark Twain novel.

Now, imagine if book publishing conglomerates started suing libraries. No Hawthorne, no Twain, no Hemingway.

Luckily for us, there was no RIAA of the literature world.

No matter what they call it -- illegal downloading, piracy, whatever -- a free market for music is a good thing.

And there's too many of us for the RIAA to stop. One for all, and all for one.

Kevin Doran is a senior majoring in media studies and is the Venues editor for The Daily Collegian. His e-mail is kad952@psu.edu.