Back in 1999, when Napster was at its peak of popularity, I used to spend all my free time at work downloading MP3s. And having spent most of 1998 automating all of my job responsibilities, I had a lot of free time. I downloaded every song I could think of. It’s a good thing that nobody was paying attention to how much time I was actually spending at the office, because my musical tastes weren’t broad enough to justify more than eight hours a week of downloading. If my boss had actually been paying attention to when I was arriving and leaving, I’d probably have 80 gigs of polka clogging up my hard drive.
I justified my theft of copyrighted songs by blaming the greedy record companies. It irritated me that they expected me to pay eighteen bucks for a CD when I only wanted a single song on it. I mean, who the hell wants an entire album by A-Ha? My thinking was, I can go to the grocery store and pick up a single 3 Musketeers bar for a dollar. If the candy industry worked like the music industry, I’d either have to pay $4.99 for a 3 Musketeers with some inedible detritus taped to the other side, or shell out $18 for a pretty package filled with barely palatable machine scrapings just so I could get that one 3 Musketeers.
I’d have felt a little more inclined to fork over that kind of money if I thought that any of it was actually tricking down to the artists. I suppose I could have just downloaded the songs illegally and then sent checks directly to the artists, but I’m not sure they’d want my charity. Besides, I think I’m already giving to the members of A-Ha through the United Way or something.“If only the record companies would offer individual songs for, like, a dollar, I’d be willing, nay, glad to pay for them,” I said to myself.
And then they called my bluff. Now that you can get most songs for 99 cents, I feel obligated to pay for all the music I download. Bastards.
So I stopped downloading songs illegally. But then the question arose of what to do with my existing collection. There was a surprising amount of gray area here, as with songs that were on an album that I once had, but then lost. Should I have to pay for another copy of a song, just because I can’t find my copy? Surely not. And what about a CD that I had loaned to a friend, but never got back? I still owned it, didn’t I?
And what about the CDs that I had borrowed from friends, never gave back, and then lost? I didn’t intend to steal them; I just, you know, forgot to return them. Besides, the people I borrowed these CDs from had certainly given up on getting them ever back, which is to say that they had ceded any claim of ownership to me. Or to look at it another way, maybe I did steal them, but wasn’t that all in the past now? If I was going to be blamed for having stolen something years earlier, then shouldn’t I at least have a copy of it?
In the end, it was decided to form a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to consider these issues. The Committee spent many hours deliberating, eventually coming to the conclusion that “mistakes were made,” and that it was in everyone’s best interest to put the whole sordid mess behind us. Thus it was that my entire pre-Reconciliation music library was grandfathered in. A blanket amnesty was declared.
Today my undocumented recordings live in harmony with my legally acquired songs. I try to get all my new music from legitimate sources like iTunes, but man, they don’t make it easy. I just bought a little 2 gig MP3 player a few weeks ago, and I immediately set about copying over a big chunk of my music library. After a few hours of listening, however, I noticed that a lot of my songs weren’t playing. This was, of course, because my Philips MP3 player won’t play Apple’s music format. Apple, you see, has their own proprietary format that allows them to keep you from making unlimited copies of the file.
This is a brilliant move on Apple’s part, except for the fact that if I were the kind of person who was going to make a hundred copies of my music files and give them all to my friends, I wouldn’t have paid Apple for the song in the first place. I would have just used Limewire to download it for free.
The other problem with Apple’s protection racket is that in order to play a song, your computer has to be able to decode it. And if your computer can decode it, it can copy it. Which is why there are a hundred free applications out there that will convert Apple’s proprietary format to MP3 or some other unprotected format. So basically Apple’s scheme only works on two groups of people: people who have no interest in stealing from them, and people who are too dumb to figure out how to steal from them.
I downloaded one of these converters and converted all of my songs. Now I can copy them as many times as I want without having to worry that the song is going to suddenly stop working. And as a bonus, the songs will actually play on my MP3 player.
So now I’m looking to acquire some new songs, and I’m debating what to do. I have no problem paying a buck per song, but I don’t really want to worry about keeping track of licenses or screw around with converter programs. I just want to listen to my friggin’ music.
Between you and me, the Limewire option is sounding pretty good. Besides, who wants to give more money to Metallica so that tool Lars Ulrich can keep whining about how his fans are ripping him off?
I think I’m going to have a 3 Musketeers and write a check to the United Way.
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Labels: Music, Technology
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