Moral qualm

The 100 Hour Board chat site, what I sometimes call the "Off Board," has had some really great discussions lately. Truly worthy of thought. The string I started was the most interesting to me because I got to see how other people deal with a dilemma I'm facing. It's my dilemma with downloading music, books, programs, etc. Even though I still kinda think it's wrong, I haven't entirely stopped doing it.

I remember my freshman year when my roomie showed me how you could download songs. I remember being flabbergasted. "Music!? For FREE?!? How cool is that?" And then a friend from back home told me about this strange new program called "Napster," and after getting a gullible friend to download it first (to see if it had viruses, without risking my own computer) I downloaded as fast as I could burn to CD. It was glorious.

My initial glee in downloading music stemmed primarily from the fact that the recording labels had gotten fat and lazy. When Napster got big, I hadn't purchased a new CD in years because they were too expensive. $20 for two hits doesn't strike me as a deal, and the average starving student doesn't have that much cash to shell out every time a nice new single comes out. So I had trolled the used CD stores for years, getting bargains where I could. The precursor to downloading, of course, was burning. I remember collecting a bunch of CD's from my friends and burning all my favorite tracks onto one great CD. I didn't feel bad about it at all then. I hardly felt bad about it when Napster was new. But somewhere between then and now it became an issue of honesty, and that's a lot harder to rationalize. I've stopped downloading music, but I just downloaded some cool books, and the dilemma is back. Mind you, several of the books are way past copyright, but some of them are quite recent and quite protected. So what do I do now?

Well, if I was looking for someone to urge me to suck it up and do the right thing, I apparently went to the wrong place, because everyone on the Off Board insisted that the recording labels were fat and lazy and that downloading didn't hurt the artists at all. Of course, their responses were more intelligent than that, but I didn't get too much encouragement to cease my activities. So I guess I'll continue on. But as a believer in (and a future advocate of) the law, I'll have to stop sometime. It's just a matter of when.