Downloading Communism

With the flurry of recent articles about when the Beatles will finally appear on iTunes, I keep wondering who really cares? Are there any Beatles fans waiting for their albums to be made available at the iTunes music store so they'll finally be able to listen to Revolver on their iPods?

Even though there isn't any legal way to purchase Beatles songs in digital format, most people have probably learned how to import their CDs to iTunes. And people who don't own the CDs have learned how to borrow them from the public library and import them into iTunes. And people who don't want to deal with CDs at all have learned how to download them via P2P.

And for people who want to buy Beatles songs online in a legally gray way, there are always the Russian sites like AllofMP3 and MP3Fiesta (obvious URLs, but I'm not linking to them). These sites have almost everything the Beatles (and Led Zeppelin, and Radiohead) ever recorded, in mp3 format for around 10 cents a track.

And that's not just everything they ever released, but everything they ever recorded. In their lives, the Beatles released 12 albums and 168 songs. There are 151 Beatles CDs available on MP3Fiesta, mono and stereo mixes, US and UK versions, and tons of "unauthorized limited edition" recordings (you know, "bootlegs"). One of the ways I deal with the guilt of dealing with these shady sites is by trying to use them to obtain material that I couldn't legally purchase even if I wanted to.

It somehow seems less wrong to download bootlegs from unauthorized sites than it does to download legally available material from these sites. When you're ripping off bootleggers, it's almost like you're doing a good thing, but in another way, that sounds like the sort of logic that O.J. would've used last week?