2nd
Why I’m Going to Start Buying CD’s
I’ve never been a big downloader. I wrote off P2P years ago for essentially being malware you install yourself, and it took me a long time to bother how to work BitTorrent. I almost never use it. Certainly not enough for any ISP to notice the kind of bandwidth spike that leads to lawsuits.
But despite my relatively safe and conservative piracy methods, there’s been an unfortunate evolution in my philosophy on the violation of intellectual property and copyright. I say “unfortunate” because, though I’m still too broke to be buying anything that doesn’t pay off loans or meet my physiological Maslow needs, I now feel compelled to buy the albums I love.
In a store. New. I think of it as voting in an election tallied by record sales. In that view, simply owning the original CD doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything to support the artist.
This doesn’t mean I’m opposed to downloading them first. I’m not about to start buying records I haven’t heard, and my discretion will remain elevated for budget and space reasons. I don’t appreciate having the physical discs, jewel cases, or even liner notes, and I definitely don’t have the space to store them. But I can’t reconcile droning on about the artists I love anymore while technically having stolen their creative work that seduced me in the first place.
It’s only now that I anticipate being nailed with a crushing RIAA lawsuit for downloading, because the irony would be too good for fate to resist.
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