Sailing the digital seas

It has been documented at this point how much I love music. But it hasn't been said how much I have or how I obtained it. So I guess this is just a breif history and maybe a type of confession now that things have changed for me along these lines.

I have 72 physical CDs.
I have roughly 960 mp3 albums collected.
I have no idea how many archived and/or deleted albums I have gone through.

So, I have been a very naughty pirate of the internet. It is an old habit that I know better than to do. It used to be simple to do and easy to ignore how wrong it is. Since those days when I would come into work and browse through the 3 gigs of music I downloaded overnight (P2P) day after day I have gotten to a point where I at least pay a monthly fee for my music and download it far less. It isn't really enough compared to what I download and re-record and it certainly doesn't act as payback for the thousands of songs I managed to download over the years, but it does ease my consience a bit now and for the future. I don't feel like a thief now that I am paying for the vast majority of the music. Generally, I used the P2P software to gather masses of music because I had no other way of taste testing on a large scale. Much of what I downloaded I didn't like or keep whereas now I can hear things before I download and so I only download what I like. BTW, I use napster to do this.

I was not limited to pirating music by any means. In fact, their is little on the internet that I am not able to abuse after years of digging and learning how. The problem is I fell into the same hole many before me have fall into. It's there, I can reach it, nobody will know, and (more often than not) I can't afford it. If I were starving and homeless and we were talking about a loaf of bread I wouldn't feel that it were so wrong but we aren't and it isn't. Thankfully, I never really learned how to be a "hacker", just how to reverse-engineer and troll for things. I might have been dangerous...er...more dangerous.

I thought about blogging this after watching the opening of a movie which had a brief "downloading is illegal" advertisement aimed at movies and music. I used to laugh at things like that but the truth is it was wrong to do that stuff. I was being selfish. Which is not to say the music industry isn't selfish any less than the medical, insurance, political, or other big businesses industries. It was ok for them to be greedy against consumers but when the consumers got greedy back it became an issue. Honestly, when you really dig into the topic it gets to a point where the line blurs so much thatit is hard to tell exactly what's right and wrong. It's called sharing. Specificaly what is too much sharing and what kind of sharing are we talking about. It gets complexe and though some of it can be defined it ends up being a predominantly opinionated issue. If it were otherwise the jails would be full of techno-theifs and techno-terrorists. A messy issue about money is all it is. Who is losing it and who was getting it. The safe bet in any such fight is to stop running the line despite how safe it seems and just hang up the eye-patch and peg-leg.