A Question of Morals

I am a big fan of the internet. This medium affects my everyday life, much more than traditional radio, print media, or television ever has. It permits me to communicate easily. It allows me to manage a whole lot of information, from research to music to pictures. It enables me to learn about anything and everything. Whatever I do for a career, the internet will play a major role in it.

The internet has created some serious ethical concerns as well. Here's one from today.

In two weeks, I'll start a class called "The Economics of Discrimination". Though it's a required class (multicultural credit; sounded better than taking some dumb women's studies class), it looks pretty promising.

I went to UNLV's bookstore website where I can find all the books I'll need for a class. Turns out I'll need Freakonomics. Knowing that this is a pretty popular book, I immediately searched the UNLV library and the nearby Sahara library databases for its presence. Both databases showed that the book was available. They also showed that I could download an "electronic" version of the book.

For Christmas, I received an iPod touch. Love the thing. I maintain notes from gospel study when away from my notebooks, as well as scriptures, tons of PDF's (including many church manuals), a dictionary, my daily planner, and of course, music (really enjoying They Might Be Giant's Flood and parts of John Vanderslice's new record).

All kinds of companies employ some sort of digital rights management, or DRM. For the most part, this kind of protectionism is understandable, but the 'management' quickly becomes 'containment' or 'annoyance' or 'really, really dumb idea'. Like: I found Freakonomics on the Sahara library website, but can only read the book on my PC using Adobe software (can't print to a PDF either, tried that). Another instance is that the library will allow me to download the audio from the book, but it can only be played on the computer using the proprietary (Microsoft) .wma format, and if you try to convert it to mp3, it'll sound like children singing Disney songs underwater, recorded on cassette and glitched up by Autechre. The Man says: "You can only listen at home. No where else. Dude."

So at this point I google "Freakonomics pdf", and of course, find the book immediately.

I really like to carry very few things on my person. My iPod lets me carry a whole lot in a little package.

What would be wrong about downloading the PDF of Freakonomics and putting it on my iPod if the library will let me download the book for my PC? I'll even delete the book and buy a copy if it's good at the end of the class.

What would you do?

(By the way, E. Bednar's recent talk on digital media was excellent. I watched it on my iPod.)