Ye Olde Rad Blog

Saw the new HBO special: K-Street last night. On the surface, it appears to be a fly-on-the-wall look at lives of high-power political consultants in Washington DC. Upon closer inspection however, it's actually "an experimental fusion of reality and fiction".

I don't care much for politics, but this episode caught my attention, cuz it addresses the moral and ethical issues surrounding the downloading of MP3s, and how legislators feel about it.

If you search for either Ripping CDs, or MP3 encoding, you'll find the Radified Guide to Ripping & encoding is a popular How-to on creating the highest quality MP3s. Far as I know, this guide is the *first* of its kind (originally published back in 2001, and frequently updated). Since then many other guides have come along. Some of these authors even mentioned using mine as a starting point and their inspiration (such as Professor Kurth).

As you might imagine, I get plenty of mail on this heated topic. Some claim that I'm "teaching people how to rip off Recording artists" .. as if I were some evil person who published a schematic on how to build a nuclear bomb. They seem to forget it's perfectly legal to encode MP3s (from the songs on a legally-purchased CD).

The new HBO series I mentioned is named for the street (in Washington DC) that runs east-west only 3 blocks from the White House. See here (56-KB, red line is K-street). I used to live in southern Pennsylvania, and spent many wonderful weekends in DC [neighboring Georgetown, actually .. always hitting Clyde's for brunch on Sunday morning].

What interested me most about the episode was .. they sat down a group of high-school students and asked them a variety of questions about downloading MP3s. Some of their responses:

* We don't see it as stealing from the artists (who are cool), but rather from industry execs (who we don't care about).
* Is there really a law that says I can't download an MP3?
* Why should I pay $12 for a CD when my neighbor is going to download it for free?
* We know it would be wrong to walk into a store and steal a CD, but it doesn't seem wrong to download a song or two from a CD we don't have the money to buy anyway.
* When asked if they felt it was morally wrong to download MP3s, not a single student raised his hand.

I also found it interesting when one of the consultants said the quality of MP3 are "not nearly as good" as the original CD. This might've been true a year or two ago, when nearly all MP3s were 128-kbps, but people today are learning how to create high-quality MP3s, and lossless audio files, which are equal in fidelity to the original CD.

Another point they brought up was that nobody wants to buy a (whole) CD when they only like one or two songs on it .. and one song is not worth $12. The politician's bottom line is "My colleges and I don't feel good about arresting a 13-year old girl and taking her away in handcuffs."