#25: Am I a music pirate? It's hard to know...

Ah! I remember the early days of Napster. It was around 2000 and I remember going to visit a friend on campus at Rice University. Now I've played also with the early edition of Winamp but what I saw was that he was listening streaming MP3's. It literally blew my mind.

Here we had the MP3 player that now played streamed MP3's through the internet. Anyone with a computer and a nice music list could become a DJ and there where several genres you could listen too.

But now what if you didn't have alot of CD's you could rip to your computer? What if you didn't have money to pay for all these new CD's when you only wanted one popular song on it.

Well que in Napster. You'd download this program and install it, configure it to your bandwidth speed, locate the music folder you wanted to share and voila free music. You can download pretty much any song you could think off....for free! Basically people would rip their CD collections and the more music you'd share the more people would share with you. If you didn't share a music folder or enough music you'd be limited to really slow download speeds and limited search functions.

But those days are over after Lars Ulrich and Metallica took Napster to court. After that trial free music and any software that allowed you to trade any music online where chased down by the RIAA and laywers.

Burning a song is pretty simple using the instructions provided by iHCPL. I opened up Windows Media Player, inserted a blank CD, followed the simple instructions and was able to burn the free music I downloaded from music.download.com.

This should be pretty straight unless you have DRM that will not allow you to do this.

Sharing music on a grand scale could leave artists out in the cold but with DRM it seems we're force fed this software that is unwanted. Usually artist like Radiohead that are at the frontier of fighting DRM and also offering free downloads really show that giving an option people will usually pay for a song. Downloading I do think is illegal but the punishment is too harsh. I think of these people that download music as customers that are not being served correctly.

Think of China and their illegal digital distribution. It is illegal to buy copied movies from a street vendor but this is a customer that has not been served correctly. What they are doing now is offering free movies or movies online for very cheap and cutting the middle man out. This brings in money and helps cut piracy alot.

This should be done with music and DRM should really go away. It's as if I buy music, I pay for it but I cannot listen to it on a different device of copy it for backup.