When I graduated, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to be involved in the production of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of China, a wonderful project in which I was able to work with a team of incredibly skilled and generous people. I put a good deal of myself into the project, involved as I was with choosing the subjects to include, working with the authors on what to include in the articles, helping design and compile the images, and keeping the systems running which provided the heart of the project.

I’ve also, as I’ve grown up, been immeasurably unimpressed with large corporate copyright holders, especially in the music and entertainment industry. I am one of the kids who has grown up with music being something that can exist anywhere, and is not a ‘thing,’ but instead more of creature… something that, once turned loose, grows, develops, and multiplies. It is not a disk, or a cassette, or a performance, it is a file. And, as I see people of my generation, who did something every other person between the ages of 10 and 30 in the USA has done, prosecuted for millions, I lose all sympathy with the rights holders. Only half of the previous demo will admit to file sharing, but that’s because the other 50% doesn’t realize that the RIAA would sue them for half a million dollars for the time they sent that song to their friend in middle school.

I now have reason to moderate my opinion in that respect. The encyclopedia I spent a year and a half on was offered for free, electronically, online. This pisses me off. It’s not their work, they don’t have the right to do what they do. It makes me almost quake in anger, but I’m sure from their standpoint, they are doing the same thing I did when I (hypothetically, don’t sue me RIAA) took an album from a friend’s shared iTunes (also hypothetically, after listening to the hypothetical album, I bought the hypothetical new album on iTunes).

So, today, I find myself torn. I still don’t feel sad for the huge music industry figures, but, honestly, if I didn’t know Berkshire was just a small office in the Berkshire hills, I might have been willing to pirate our encyclopedias just by looking at our perfectly modern and up-to-date website. The justification, internally, is simple. A low risk, high reward crime against people you neither know nor suspect you’d like. Perhaps its time for me to get to know some of the people who work in the music industry…

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