I almost didn’t make it this month. Late March was busier then usual, what with grades at the University of Oregon due the Monday after Finals Week (due to the short break). In addition, Holy Week fell during Spring Break this year, so, between the various services at my church, I didn’t get much of a break at all. Still, I had allotted plenty of time to get my column done, but I hadn’t accounted for one thing…

The possibility that record execs would eat my hard drive.

I’ll start from the beginning. I came into a little spare cash recently, and decided to splurge on a few CDs. Two were classical, and the third was by a popular alternative rock band. Following Steve Jobs’ recent invitation to “Rip, Mix, Burn” I promptly opened iTunes to encode them to my hard drive. The two classical CDs gave me no problem, but when I loaded the aforementioned rock CD and selected Convert to MP3 in iTunes, the following warning appeared on my screen:

AAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

What could I do? My only option was “OK.” I tried clicking on the desktop, force quitting, and rebooting, but nothing worked. Before I finally hit return, and said goodbye to my hard drive, I could hear it spinning futilely in the background. It seemed to be saying “Save me, please,” but there was nothing I could do.

At first I was angry. It took a whole day to get everything reinstalled the way I wanted it. (I keep my personal files on another disk, thankfully, so nothing important was lost.) This set me way back on getting my column written, even farther back than I already was.

I’m not angry anymore, though. Why? Because of something I read a few days later in the local paper. The Sony Disc Manufacturing Plant is in nearby Springfield, and over the last few months, they’ve had to lay off hundreds of workers. The signs were clear to all who would dare look. CD piracy had cost those poor people their jobs. Well, some of those workers have since been recalled. I now know the reason why. It’s because of the brave executives of the RIAA, eating hard drives across America, including my own.

So in retrospect, the data on my hard drive was a small price to pay to give hundreds of local workers their job security back. I now see the error of my ways, and pledge to never again pirate any of my own CDs. And until the plague of music piracy is lifted—until the day that talented artists can once again make pennies on the dollar, and consumers can once again spend $18.99 for a favorite song on a CD filled with other tracks they’ll play only once—until that great day happens, I say to the RIAA, in the words of the venerable Crime Dog, “take a bite out of crime.” And while they’re at it, I can think of something else they can “bite” as well.

I love April…ha, ha, April Fool!

Copyright © 2002 David Ozab, dozab@atpm.com. David Ozab is an adjunct instructor at the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts where he teaches an introductory class in electronic music for the new Multimedia Minor. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Oregon School of Music, and is taking a year’s leave-of-absence to work on his dissertation.