420 Summit

Ahoy!

Earlier today I ran into something I haven’t encountered in years. I was downloading a massive Photoshop composition and was informed by Windows that I didn’t have adequate storage. Considering the size of my drives and how psycho I am about keeping things lean, this came as something of a surprise.

It would seem that my children have discovered BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay — to the tune of forty gigs.

This opens up a whole can of worms. My guys haven’t the slightest concept of intellectual property. Music has always been free for them and they firmly believe that they are entitled to download anything they damn well please. I find myself going into a great deal of detail (I even made them read a EULA) about the difference between licensing something and owning something. Then again, try telling a kid who has saved his hard earned money that he doesn’t really own the box set of CD’s he just bought.

My children are not dishonest. They do not lack a grasp of nuance and will, almost always, make the right decision. I’ve done a pretty good job with the Golden Rule and the right vs. wrong thing. However, they seem truly incapable of understanding that music and video can be owned and that they are expected to pay for entertainment.

They just aren’t getting it and when my eleven year-old asks how someone can own beautiful music, I have to wonder if she doesn’t have a point. I asked her how she would feel if someone took her art and her response was: “I would just make more and give it to them.”

It doesn’t help that they have good taste and it’s kind of nice having my own radio station.