The pinstriped phantom appeared out of nowhere and stapled a "Swapper!" sign to my chest.

"Okay buddy, here's your subpoena. Now follow me for your trial."

Huh? How'd this happen?

I did like I do every morning. I got off the train and I threw my newspaper on top of the garbage can -- not into the garbage-slot proper -- to give folks waiting on the platform something to read.

A share-the-love, good karma thing, right?

Wrong.

"Hey," I tried to explain. "I paid for that newspaper!"

"Right," replied the jack-booted legal phantasm. "But that doesn't give you the right to redistribute it. Others want it? They can buy their own paper! You're no better than a dirty music-file swapper." He slapped on handcuffs and started pulling me down a long, dark, supernatural corridor.

"It's not like I copied it or something!" I protested.

"Oh, we got her too," he said with a smirk, motioning toward a librarian-type lady being escorted down the hall by a ghostly prosecutor of her own.

"All I did was Xerox a recipe," she pleaded.

My ghoul was gleeful. "Thank God for the Recording Industry Association of America. They showed us the way! You sue average Joes and Janes in a high-profile bust-up and ... shazam! The crime dries up."

He had a point.

After the RIAA first started suing individuals for illegally swapping music over the Internet -- using peer-to-peer systems like KaZaa, for example -- the number of people pirating music dropped by half, from 35 million to 18 million, according to a study by the Pew Internet Project.

"If it worked for music, it'll work for other things ... like newspaper pass-along artists," my prosecutor smirked. "Or," he pointed at a group of teenagers being herded along the corridor, "like people who find one person with an HBO subscription ... AND THEN THROW A 'SEX IN THE CITY' PARTY SO THEY CAN WATCH FOR FREE!"

The kids cringed.

"OR ..." he turned his rage onto a mother and her kids morosely walking ahead of us, "people who buy one refillable soda at a restaurant, AND END UP SHARING IT WITH EVERYONE AT THE TABLE!"

I couldn't help being a smart ass.

"But isn't dragging all these people into court going to cost a lot?" I asked.

"The RIAA showed us cost and hassle don't matter. Their second wave of lawsuits this week has to use a cumbersome subpoena process, sure. But if it pays off like the first set of suits did, it'll be worth it. Remember that Pew study -- 17 million dropped out of the piracy game the first time around."

We came to a long line of people, no doubt waiting for their turn before the court.

"Okay, people may fear the stick," I conceded. "But couldn't the dropoff also be due, at least in part, to the availability of relatively easy, cheap, and legal ways to get music online? I mean Napster, iTunes and others weren't really into full swing until last fall. Maybe the music industry needed to concentrate on the carrot end all along?"

My ghostly prosecutor ignored my question and surveyed the line ahead.

"This may be a long wait," he muttered.

"Got a paper?" I asked.  

Allen Wastler is managing editor of CNN/Money and a commentator on CNNfn.