The Love of Music Versus the Rucksack

So there seem to be a few driving forces that are conflicting here. The first is my love of music, the second is my concept morals, the third is the rucksack lifestyle, and the fourth is, well the interests of the production companies.

In short, I want to have a lot of music, but I don't want to carrying around a zillion (is that a word?) CD's with me. The first solution is to download using bit torrent etc. Of course for a small sect of the population this is actually deemed as stealing, and unfortunately I happen to be one of the last members of the very very exclusive club. The second solution would be iTunes, but just to save a lot of time with explanations, I think most people can conclude that not every single song has made it to iTunes. The third solution, for those songs that are not on iTunes (maybe I will talk about how much I hate DRM in a later post) would be to buy-rip-sell/"freecycle". This seems like a much better solution at first glance because I could get any CD that is available, I could reuse them as gifts or I could recoup some money. Unfortunately, this world is not that simple and no matter how hard someone tries to do the right thing, there always seems to be one more obstacle in the way.

You see when you buy a CD you don't really own anything. All you have are a few rights. You have the right to listen to that music that you bought, you have the right to create a personal backup, etc. When you transfer the CD to someone else, either through sale or gift, you are actually transferring your right to listen to that piece of media. So if I bought a CD and made a copy on my hard drive, and then sold that same CD, well I would have to erase the copy on my hard drive. So this means if I want to keep legally listening to my music, I can neither sell nor give away the actual disc because of the fear that if someone actually listened to it, I would be breaching my agreement with the production company! So now what are my options? I can destroy to disc so that it doesn't get into the wrong hands and actually get played. After looking at this last option, I decided to let this whole idea sit on a backburner for a while until Linsday, Carlos's girlfriend, told me about a new solution: buy a CD, rip, sell, send moneys earned by sale to production company to reconcile there being two licenses to listen to the music. Of course the production company probably won't like this because they do not get the determine how much they are getting for the extra license, but then again, everytime I buy a CD they are actually getting the sale of two licenses out of it, so I feel as though it is a fair trade.

Now I can't wait to try this for the first time and see the response. What will happen when some mail processor at Mos Def's production company opens up an envelope with a check from me to the company and a letter explanation? If I do get a response, I am sure it will be golden.