Download dilemma has
him on auto pirate
Finally this summer the jealousy got too great and I bought a new, CD-burning computer. However, not long after first sitting down to burn with willful abandon, I made a frightening discovery: Apparently, CD burning is passe! The aforementioned hipsters are now using their CDs to prop up their hip wobbly coffee tables and play catch with their hip dogs.
Meanwhile, they’re loading electronic music files into players like the Apple iPod. To give you an idea of what this means, a CD can hold about 20 songs, whereas the iPod can hold — the following number is not a typo — 7,500 songs, in a player the size of a cigarette pack. However, it’s worth noting that you can’t actually smoke them.
There’s an added wrinkle too, in that for many people a good number of those 7,500 songs have been downloaded via the Internet, which is sort of, in a manner of speaking, technically kind of illegal. At least the record companies say it’s illegal, although they’re being opposed by a very powerful lobbying group, namely, the Drunken College Slackers of America, who argue that if they had to pay for music they’d have no money left for their rave drugs.
Lawmakers, meanwhile, have proposed making sharing music files over the Internet a jailable offense. So say that — strictly for the purposes of researching this column — I’ve been spending my nights downloading hundreds of copyrighted music files, to the point where my family has found me slumped over my keyboard as the copy of “Weekend in New England” I was too embarrassed to buy at a record store loads onto my hard drive. Should I be sent to jail for this, where I’d likely be subjected to the following conversation?
CELL MATE: Yo, cellie! I’m here for poppin’ a cap at some bangers with my 4-5. What are you in for?
ME: Um ... Manilow?
Legal issues aside, though, it seems to me it’s also a philosophical question — specifically, should music be free, with the answer of course being “yes,” as should every other form of entertainment and certain food products (Raisinets, etc.). Granted the economy would probably collapse, but I’d have a lot of neat free stuff, so it’s a toss-up.
Besides, hasn’t the record industry considered that people may be discovering new music through file sharing? I know if I downloaded new songs and wound up enjoying them, I’d go out and buy the CD. Either that or download the rest of the tracks, burn them onto discs and sell them off the back of a truck. One of those two things.
Either way, I’m now faced with several dilemmas: Do I become a full-fledged music pirate by downloading every song I’ve ever heard, or read about, or imagined might exist? And do I try to convince my wife that we should take $500 from the kids’ college fund for an iPod, when she knows I’ve just sprung for a new computer to do “work” that, if pressed, I could do on a manual typewriter?
Well, as much as I want to become one of those free-music-downloading iPod hipsters I hate so much, I also want to set a good legal example for my kids, and a good fiscal one for my ever-shrinking wallet. So I guess for now I’ll be sticking with burning the songs I’ve already got.
And laughing at those poor suckers with tape decks, of course.