Editorial
A farewell to music: the download challenge

Let me start this off by saying that I’m a bit of a music junkie. I can easily spend hours and hours and hundreds of dollars in between the A and Z section of the pop/rock rack at any independent music store. But I haven’t always been this way. I used to get all the music I wanted for free.

Hello, my name is Erin Wilds, and I’m a recovering music pirate.

Before January of 2009, my personal computer acted as a storehouse for several thousand illegally downloaded songs, but after several years of playing this game, I was starting to feel kind of guilty about it.  So, in early January of 2009, I made a New Years’ resolution to quit downloading music illegally.

Yes, that’s right, I said illegally. Maybe I should have started there. The intricate details of the law are complicated, but the main concept is quite simple. If you have music on your computer, iPod, or other electronic device that you obtained without paying for it, odds are you are guilty of music theft.

Alright, now, back to me. I knew this all along. I always knew that getting music without paying for it was illegal; I just didn’t bother to care. But things slowly started to change.

Before, when I pirated music, I still loved music, listened to it, and played it just like now. Since the change, though, it’s been different. Now I collect music, study music and gain all sorts of useless knowledge about musicians. I educate myself musically, analyze lyrics and read back stories on songs. As I started to really learn, I began to feel kind of bad about getting this music for free. Who am I that I should be entitled to that? So, in January of 2009, I quit downloading.

I did well until about September of that year when I ripped off a few songs from a friend’s computer. No big deal, right? Well, maybe not, I guess, if you compare my theft to some people. And besides, all in all, I was doing pretty well on my resolution. One thing bothered me though: when I decided to stop downloading, I still had hundreds and hundreds of illegal copies of songs stored on my hard drive, and that didn’t sit very well with me.

So I started playing this little game where every time I bought a new CD, I would take note of the number of songs on that CD, and delete that same number from my illegal stash. For example, if I bought a CD that had 13 songs on it, I would delete 13 songs that I hadn’t paid for.

This worked pretty well for a while, and it helped me get rid of songs that I never really listened to. But eventually I ran into a brick wall because I got to a point where all the songs I had left were songs I really liked. I didn’t want to buy a whole CD just because it had one song on it that I liked. I kept buying stuff that I really wanted and stopped deleting anything, leaving 700-some illegal songs still sitting in my hard drive eating up 2.71 GB of storage space and, every so often, nagging at my conscience.

Until March 28, 2010, that is. That morning when I was talking to a friend the subject of downloading music came up briefly. My friend, who is actually a music producer, was talking about his encounter with a kid who was mass-downloading everything he could get his hands on. “You know that’s illegal, right?” he asked him. The kid responded by saying he didn’t care. Maybe it was hearing this from a friend who actually works in the industry, but this hit me like a ton of bricks. For a long time, I had been the one who just didn’t really care. Basically, I didn’t care that people who have made it their life’s work to follow their passion of making music were losing jobs because people like me weren’t buying their music.

I didn’t care that I was really just like those people who were torrenting all the time who I always scoff at and blame for everything wrong with the musical world. In fact, for a long time, the only thing I really cared about was that downloading meant my own personal CD tower wasn’t getting any taller, and as a collector, that did bother me.

Of course there are plenty of other reasons to not pirate music. Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first person ever sued by the Recording Industry of America for downloading music, recently made headlines again for the second time when her 2007 trial returned to court. This time, Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $1.92 million for downloading a mere 24 songs from Kazaa.

The music industry battle rages on. Major downloading websites are slowly being ordered to shut down, one by one. Napster was forced down by federal court injunction in 2001. More recently, file sharing website Limewire suffered the same fate (see The Mainstream article on Limewire in the last issue).

For me, the matter was more personal. That very afternoon in March, I resolved that the next time I had access to my music library, I would delete every single song that I hadn’t obtained through a legit process. And that’s what I did. At first it seemed a bit daunting, but once I started, I realized I didn’t want these songs anymore. So, away they went. And I can tell you firsthand that I no longer feel hypocritical when scoffing at people who abuse my beloved internet in such a way. I don’t have the woes of the industry on my conscience anymore.

Once I purged my musical library of all its impurites, what did I do?

I bought CDs, lots of CDs. I streamed music on Pandora and similar websites. And when people asked me if I wanted to borrow the new CD from (insert name of the big musician here whom I’m probably not really interested in anyway or I would have already bought the CD for myself), I politely declined and turned up the music on my headphones. And I sleep a little better each night, knowing that no more blood has been shed on my behalf, so to speak.

Now, it’s your turn. I extend the challenge to you.

Go through your music library and see if the songs you’ve downloaded from The Pirate Bay are really worth it. I’m willing to bet that if you cut off your ties to all torrent and P2P websites and start getting music through a legal means, your view of music as a whole will start to change. You’ll be able to look at your music collection as something to be proud of, and that, in my opinion, is well worth the songs lost.

Ways you could be violating the law:

Somebody you don’t even know e-mails you a copy of a copyrighted song and then you turn around and e-mail copies to all of your friends.

You make an MP3 copy of a song because the CD you bought expressly permits you to do so. But then you put your MP3 copy on the Internet, using a file-sharing network, so that millions of other people can download it.

Even if you don’t illegally offer recordings to others, you join a file-sharing network and download unauthorized copies of all the copyrighted music you want for free from the computers of other network members.

In order to gain access to copyrighted music on the computers of other network members, you pay a fee to join a file-sharing network that isn’t authorized to distribute or make copies of copyrighted music. Then you download unauthorized copies of all the music you want.

You transfer copyrighted music using an instant messaging service.

You have a computer with a CD burner, which you use to burn copies of music you have downloaded onto writable CDs for all of your friends.

The Mainstream is a student publication of Umpqua Community College.