Of a return to sleep; advanced technology; and the morality of intellectual property protection

Ah, ten straight hours spent knitting up the ravell'd sleave. Blissful; delicious.

At this point both financings that had been keeping me so busy are closed. Not without a few heart-in-the-throat moments along the way, I don't mind telling you. One would think that large companies in the middle of large transactions would know better than to, say, adopt a new accounting standard that will require a restatement of Q1 accounts, or merge a guarantor subsidiary with another entity, in the time between the red herring and pricing (or indeed, on the day of pricing itself). One would be wrong.

We've still the proposed Nasdaq listing before us, but here things are very much under control and from now until the date of the confidential submission will largely be a matter of coasting. I'm hardly on holiday, then, but after a series of weeks peaking at just shy one hundred hours billed (not my worst weeks ever, but not far short), life reverts to something approaching normal.

And the best part is that my new iPod has just arrived. It's a bit heavier than I'd expected. Mind-boggling all the same - though it fits easily in one's pocket it has twice the storage capacity of my (venerable, steam-powered, walnut-and-brass) computer.

Configuring the thing took a bit of work, especially as the software in the package was outdated, requiring a hasty (heh) download of the update. But now it appears to function. For its maiden performance this morning, it played Aoxomoxoa to me as I walked to my office. Not for me, this morning, the precision beta-wave substitute of the Goldberg-Variationen, but the peripatetic improvisations of The Eleven. (And yet, as the comments thread to this CT post makes clear, there are plenty of otherwise intelligent people who cannot abide the Dead.)

Some of the things I've loaded onto the iPod I bought fair and square from the iTunes shop. More were burnt from CDs I own, and I believe that is all very well and legal so long as I do not charge people money to listen to my iPod. A good many, though, I confess, were downloaded from KaZaA or (though here I show my age) Napster. Not so very long ago the board of directors and I decided that unlicensed music would no longer be download onto the Tilton hard-drive. (How good it felt, on unpacking the iPod and seeing its little sticker pleading 'Please don't steal music', to be able to assure my new electronic friend that my music-stealing days are behind me.) And indeed, I was vaguely troubled by accessing unlicensed music. Not troubled enough to stop, obviously. And I didn't see it as rising to the level of stealing bread from a starving child. (My download levels were unlikely to attract the RIAA's attention; the decision to stop downloading from P2P networks was more a Caesar's wife sort of thing.) But still.

Now, while I'm generally convinced that not using KaZaA is, on the whole, the Right Thing To Do, I'm not entirely satisfied. The iTunes shop is all well and good, and a fair-priced deal as well. But there are a lot of things I'd like that it simply doesn't have. And this is the great virtue of KaZaA: one finds all sorts of obscure things there that are difficult to find elsewhere, whether online or down at the shop. What is important to me is the availability of this music; I'm more than willing to pay an iTunes-level price for it, there's simply no way to do so with KaZaA.

Would it not be a wonderful thing, then, if some enterprising soul came up with a way to pay a fair fee for music downloaded off a P2P network? Unless and until iTunes or something like it manages to license all music ever recorded, there will almost by definition be obscure material sitting on individual hard drives that one cannot get otherwise without great difficulty, if at all. Wouldn't it be great if I could download, say, Angry Samoans' They Saved Hitler's Cock from KaZaA, 99 cent being automatically deducted from my pre-loaded account and sent to soothe the Samoans' anger?