The music industry has been attempting to halt the transmutation of their music ever since Metallica, a heavy metal band, filed a lawsuit against Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program, back in 2000. However, not all industries have met the changing of their products with the same resistance.

"The computer game companies...they pretty much did not try to interfere with it at all, in the first place. They are the first ones to really learn how to monetize it in the second place," said CoBA CIS assistant professor, Jerald Hughes.

A recent study conducted by Hughes indicates that Web 2.0 companies should incorporate the transmutation of their products as part of their business model. The research, titled Supplying Web 2.0: An empirical investigation of the drivers of consumer transmutation of culture-oriented digital information goods, was made available online on March 4 in sciencedirect.com and delves into transmutation's development in cultural goods.

In the study, Hughes defines transmutation as the simple changing of the original product, such as the conversion of music in an audio CD into mp3s. Personnel computers allow the casual occurrence of transmutations, so much so that some industries are having trouble adapting to the new variable.

In some cases, Hughes explains, game companies have actually purchased the rights for some of the transmutated games and sold them as their own, in exchange for returning some of the profits to the altered game's creator. So rather than spend millions in legal costs to bandage a gushing wound, they have saved millions in development costs and profited from these transmutations.

Although transmutation remains in its infancy, it has already developed three distinct levels of transmutations:

Lvl 1 Basic transmutation: People who recode the product. The product will look and sound the same but will now be a different file format, such as an audio CD's conversion into mp3 files.

Lvl 2: The consumer makes a minor change to the product. In music, this can be seen as a simple remix, while in games as the creation of new levels and changes to the way characters look.

Lvl 3 Deep remix transmutation: The consumer brings together many created products to create an entirely new piece of work, such as the combination of various songs and beats.