Remorse
10:22AM
I was going through my Twitter feed, which this morning had grown to its overnight average size of around 600 tweets. (I try to keep my “following” list to under a hundred; I don’t understand how others can have close to a thousand of them and stay sane following them all.)
I came across a tweet announcing that the original game soundtrack of my new game The Division was now available on the iTunes Store for purchase.
Without thinking about it, I immediately went to my browser and opened up my torrent indexer, changed the search criteria to Music, then put The Division in the search window. It coughed up a list of items. Then I sorted them by most recent date, and out popped on top a torrent for the new soundtrack.
I fed the torrent to Vuze, my torrent downloader of choice, and within five minutes, I had a new, fresh copy of the album, 18 tracks of FLAC-level soundtrack music by Ola Strandh of Tom Clancy’s The Division.
Then I proceeded to my audio conversion software to change it to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec format—iTunes doesn’t do FLAC), converted it, and then created an iTunes playlist for it. Then I proceeded to listen to the album while continuing to peruse my Twitter feed again.
Halfway through the first track, I caught myself and realised what I had just done. I had just casually stolen intellectual property without even thinking about it. What the hell have I done? Has this world gotten to this stage where people can just do things like these without properly acknowledging and compensating the rightful creators? Yes, of course it has. Damn.
Sure, I’m not beneath downloading torrents of currently showing TV shows, but only those that already air on the many channels of my cable provider. I figure I’m just getting them ahead of time. That’s ok, isn’t it?
But I don’t usually watch shows that are on cable that I don’t have access to. Mostly. The point is, we as a people have gotten to the stage where we don’t normally think downloading things we’re supposed to be paying for is bad, when it really and truly is.
So I went back and erased The Division soundtrack: the FLAC files, the converted ALAC files that were in an iTunes playlist and the original Torrent file I used to download them with.
Tomorrow I’m going to buy some iTunes credit and purchase the album legally and download it. Speaking as a creator of content myself, that’s the least I could do.
Dang it, I really hate it when I catch myself doing stuff like that.
Snacker Snarking