Sometime in 2003 I changed. Previously I was just like all of my Georgia Tech classmates and I would use a variety of post-Napster software tools to procure any music that I wanted (and plenty that I didn’t really want, but it was free, so why not download it??). At that time, how many gigs of music you had was really more important than how many songs and it was definitely more important than whether the music was any good or not.
Sure, I owned some actual CDs but those were from my pre-Internet2-connection days at Tech. Looking back, I didn’t think anybody saw downloading music as “illegal”. The excuses for downloading music instead of buying it – “I don’t want all the whole album, just one track”, “$16 CDs are way overpriced and I’m not going to pay that much” – were more like explanations since there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Certainly it wasn’t like pirating software – that was bad and even though everyone did it, pirating a $600 copy of Photoshop just felt different than downloading a song.
So what changed? I discovered the value of Intellectual Property and I realized why copyright law was kind of a big deal… thanks to photography.
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