  My husband and I met our freshman year at college in the nineties. As we dated through college, the mixed tapes he made me remained his most romantic gesture.
The music on the tapes would sometimes be recorded from the radio, sometimes from borrowed tapes of friends, and rarely, from his own collection. For our generation, mixed tapes were an art, and my husband was a master. A few years ago, as we prepared for the birth of our first child, he surprised me by burning CDs for my labor music.
Even now, listening to that music he selected and compiled to accompany the biggest event of our lives is moving beyond description. Heâ€™s still the master. My husbandâ€™s degree was in engineering and my own was in Anthropology, both degrees required its students to become intimately familiar with computer applications in case students were not already proficient. One byproduct of that familiarity is the place computers hold in our lives that people just a few years older than us cannot understand. Our computer is the hub of all activity in our home. It replaced the stereo long ago, and has all but replaced the VCR.
Because it holds and plays mpegs, we have no need for a DVD player. It serves as the scrap box for photos and special memories. When we travel, this computer, which is technically mine, must also come along so we can listen to music, play movies, and I can blog the trip and write. My husband brings his laptop for staying connected to work and capturing new engineering strategies the downtime often allows his mind to release. My kids bring a laptop to access sesamestreet.org or other entertaining and educational sites, to play their movies in the car, and for their gamesâ€”too big for my own computer. We are at the edge of not needing three computers when we travel anymore, but only because we know phones will replace all their capabilities within a year or two.
Our lives represent the paradigm shift that cannot be diminished by legal or congressional actions. Technology is already so intimately part of our daily routines that we donâ€™t think twice about using it. Weâ€™re not teenagers ruthlessly sharing thousands of files on a whim, weâ€™re professionals with careers who are pretty proficient with technology, and weâ€™re the face of progress.
File sharing represents a new level of technologyâ€™s use that, were it not for the ugly spin of the RIAA, educators and politicians would be celebrating. So much money is spent each year on encouraging girls to be more comfortable with technology because the video game culture until recently was the biggest draw into a techie career, and that resulted in a male-dominated technology market.
Music and audio file acquisition is a safe gateway for girls to get hooked on technology, but since a 12-year-old girl has been named in a suit for downloading, I have no doubt that parents across the country have yet another reason to admonish their children against the evils of technology. Video games are too violent, chat rooms are too dangerous, and downloading is too illegal. From this generationâ€™s view, we grew up with VCRs, recording TV shows and movies, a job now done by TIVO. We mixed tapes from the radio, we all bought the two-head jam boxes so we could record the tapes of our friends.
On a moral ground, file sharing is literally no different from any of this. Legally, I feel the precedent was set to allow such sharing as long as your not making money from it because the FBI warning Iâ€™ve fast forwarded a million times tells me thatâ€™s the standard for videos. That warning makes me ask why the movie industry didnâ€™t suffer horribly after the advent of VCRs.
I know the answer, because progress prevailed, and in this country, progress is always capitalistically advantageous. In blogs and threads, we all hear the stories of how the record industry was just as bent out of shape when FM radio came about. Only the then limited power of the RIAAâ€™s lobby kept radios from becoming so standard in Americanâ€™s lives. But now, the power of this lobby isnâ€™t limited at all. Theyâ€™ve led everyone to believe file sharing is costing them so much money, when their profit slide began before Napster put file sharing on the map and furthermore, this slide is no bigger than that of the rest of the country due to the recession and the burst of the technology bubble.
Iâ€™m not too worried about the government cracking down on file sharing. Recently, when the government of Iran came down hard on the countryâ€™s 10,000 plus bloggers, techies came together from around the world, connected by the internet, and are working on a peer-to-peer based network of sharing communications, effectively decentralizing the internet from servers. If the government puts just a little pressure on the right people here, the same nature of response might be mixed with our amazing access to capitol, and forever take the internet out of the public domain.
Then, any regulation of the web from taxes, to porn, to sharing files will be impossible. Progress always prevails. 
