PIPA and SOPA

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I suppose that anyone who has access to the internet knows that PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) have been put on the back burners in Congress for now.

I have never downloaded movies from the internet.

I did download the series finale of JAG (way back in 2005) from bit torrent because I forgot it was on and missed it, and wanted to see it. But I have never shared the episode with anyone, mainly because I didn't know anybody who would want to see it. I guess it's still on my computer somewhere, or maybe on one of my backup HDs.

I have downloaded songs back when Napster, Kazaa and Limewire were up and running. Some of them were songs I remember growing up with, but had no idea where to get them.

But most of the songs I got were the ones I had already bought and paid for - 45s and albums. And the reason I did that was to get clean versions of them to burn to CDs for my personal use.

Since the records were so old (some dating back to the 60s) the sound quality was just too bad to be able to clean up even with software designed to get the pops, clicks and hisses out of them (FYI, Audacity, a freeware program, is great for editing music files - click on the title to go to the Audacity site). And since I already paid for the songs, I didn't see where it would hurt anything to download copies that were digitally "perfect."

I do realize that downloading and sharing songs, movies, computer programs, etc., is a problem for the programmers, artists, actors, and record/TV/movie companies, since they are losing so much money. And I wish I had a solution that would make everybody happy (which I doubt there is one).

Maybe some kind of legislation is the answer, but it will have to be worded VERY carefully so that there will be no trampling on the rights of the legitimate sites that post music, movies, computer programs and original material.

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