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Man on Film by Justin Aclin

            As your self-styled entertainment columnist, I feel it is my civic responsibility, nay, my duty to report on a hot-button topic that is on the lips of everyone even remotely interested in the music business.  I’m talking of course, about Britney Spears porn.  Memo to pornographers: We all know it’s fake!  You’re just wasting bandwidth that could be used for decent porn. 

            Another, decidedly less important issue is file sharing.  At the heart of this screaming-eel-filled lake of controversy is Napster, a file sharing program created by former Northeastern student Sean Fanning, so called because its creator once went to a Northeastern hockey game and fell asleep.  Who can blame him?

            Napster allows its users to share files called mp3’s with each other.  Mp3’s are CD quality songs. Being given out.  For free.  Now you’re seeing the problem.  Our capitalist government and the military-industrial complex that run it hate things being given out for free.  They are currently investigating those textbook companies that hand out free stuff on Comm Ave and targeting them for elimination.  However, it’s not only the record companies whose proverbial panties are in the proverbial bundle over this.  It’s also those anti-establishment renegades, the rock stars! 

Rock stars argue that Napster takes money directly out of artists’ pockets.  They are wrong, however.  I’ve tried.  It only lets you get mp3’s.  Leading the crusade against Napster is the drummer for Metallica (the world’s most accident prone rockers), Lars Ulrich.  It is especially ironic that Lars is leading the support for musician’s rights, since he is not a musician himself.  Only a drummer. 

Lars is a little man whose ass I could probably kick, except that his name is Lars, which sounds German, and you can just never tell with Germans.  (All hate letters from Germans, drummers, and the Japanese can be sent to the editorial department at the Daily Free Press.  For those members of the Japanese community who are confused… just wait a couple of paragraphs.)  However, (I was making a point, you’ll remember.  Just scan up past those long, unnecessary parentheses.  And these.) Lars has managed to cause quite a stir for a man whose job it is to hit things with sticks.  The latest target of his strongly worded affidavits (God, that sounds so badass, don’t it?) is several prominent American universities.  And this one.  Obviously, it took them a while to get past the first tier of colleges in the US News rankings to threaten with lawsuits.

Colleges are a target because their atmosphere of nerds with high-speed internet access is clinically proven to foster file sharing.  And I have to admit, your humble columnist is not above the occasional mp3 download or 200.  Now, bear with me as I explain why this is a victimless crime (read: cover my ass).  First of all, before I got my Ethernet access and started going bucknutty with the downloading, I had to be much more selective with what I got, since each mp3 took about twenty minutes, instead of THREE FRIGGIN SECONDS like it does now.  Therefore, I only downloaded a handful of mp3’s.  And you know what?  After I got an mp3, seventy percent of the time I went out and bought the album, because I liked the band enough to invest twenty minutes of my time into getting their song.

Now that I’m drunk with power on the speed of my connection , I still download my songs in socially responsible and Lars-approved ways for the most part.  For instance, a lot of what I get is either live tracks that you can’t buy, or rare import tracks that you can only buy in Japan.  Obviously, the record company doesn’t want to make money on these tracks, because they’re only selling them in Japan.  I mean, have you heard Japanese music?  No offense, but there are some cultural differences at play.

Now, don’t think that this is coming out as a blanket approval of file sharing and a blanket condemnation of short, Dutch drummers with German-sounding last names.  There are people who are living, breathing worst-case scenarios of how to use mp3’s.  I have one friend who stopped buying CD’s for a whole year because he was just downloading them.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or an SMG student to figure out that this actually is bad for the music business and artists, as well as their pet drummers.  (I’ve been picking on drummers a lot, so I feel it’s only fair to point out that I was a drummer in high school.  Sorry.)

However, as serious as this problem is, it’s not one that will go away by itself.  There are really only two options for the record companies: Destroy the internet, which was meant to withstand a nuclear war, or find a viable means of distributing music over the net and profiting from it.  Given the record industry’s track record of common sense, I’m betting they’ll go with the choice in column A.  However, before anyone does anything drastic, let me make my own suggestion: Have Britney Spears star in a porno called, “I Only Sleep With Men Who Pay For Their Music.”  Everybody wins!