Music

This small article was amusing. You can play it smart by keeping your share smaller than 1,000 songs. However, it is surprising that people have over 1,000 songs in their shares. It makes me wonder just what songs that they have, and if they know every one of their songs - for all you know, you may a copy of that song already in your share and just forgot about it. As for the computer alerting you whether or not you want it overwritten - there are ways to bypass that and still have the copy of that song in your drive - the part about the song having a 1-2 second difference in the illegal copy (like the song being 3:41 and then the next copy being 3:39).

Now what makes people want to do the whole illegal download, thing? Well, there is the obvious part about it – price. No one really wants to take money out of their pockets or bank accounts just to buy the CD.

Another part is accessibility and convenience. Picking and choosing what songs you want in your CD/computer/iPod. With the CDs, you may like one or three particular songs in there, but the rest is just crap to your ears. When you download, you can pick and choose what songs you want, and which ones you do not want – just click on the song, and there you go! Furthermore, the song is right there in the internet, why go all the way to the store when you can download it?

Aside from CDs, people can also download software and movies. There are some who download games, but I don’t know much about how that exactly works – as far as I know, there is this mod-chip that you can now buy for your DS that allows you to download whatever game you want and play it. Now for the software and movies, the same can be said for the CD reasoning – price, convenience, and accessibility. The prices for products like Microsoft and Macromedia are expensive, so you can see why people would rather download the over $100 software. Yes, you could buy freeware instead, but people are fixed into the belief that they would rather have these products. And for movies, they are mostly available on the internet weeks before they are released to the public. The quality is very different from the real-deal, but most people don’t care.