Thursday, November 27, 2008

It's Mine, ALL MINE!!!

Buying music has had its day. So has renting movies. I can still remember a time when, after hitting the supermarket, weekend thrills included renting a VHS tape at Video Bug. While I'm not even sure that renting movies was a legitimate enterprise, back then, there was a kind of value system that went with the practice—you had to pay for something and return it on time. And if one was truly benevolent, one could accommodate the request on the tape's back flap please rewind. Many people these days seem to think that if you can download it, it's yours. That notion that if I can find it online, it's mine—in fact, the harder it is to download, the more it is mine, the more right I have to it. Truth is, many of these things on the Internet is copyrighted material, only it's been cycled out so many times that it became public domain—eventually. And with the almost total anonymity of surfing, who cares? Well, the people whose hard work went into these "freebies", of course, but aside from them—everyone loves the freedom of the Internet. It's like having an invisibility cloak, taking and doing what you want. I believe that technology is a mirror that reflects us and what we value. So I wonder what all this wanton taking, getting, and owning—says about us.

1 comment:

Raymond Roque said...

i agree. this applies to me also.