I was on the phone with the Pope the other day, and he expressed some concern over the RIAA’s recent activities. He was worried about a hymn or two he had downloaded for last Sunday. Would he go to Hell for playing stolen hymns with what were essentially good intentions? Aside from being obviously flattered by the holiest man in the world asking for my advice on moral issues, I was fairly confused. I personally would never dream of downloading music to my own computer those Backstreet Boys MP3s were someone else’s, I swear! but what would happen to those evildoers who did? There’s a famous story I read on some website about how Metallica first made it big through bootleg trading of their ‘Master of Puppets’ album. These days, Metallica’s joined the group of Good Guys (and bad musicians), with their latest Christian work, St. Anger, offering a rotating selection of free MP3s from their site. But the point of the story was that free trading of music actually increased sales, if we’re to believe market research. That’s what I told the grand old gent it was all good in the Vatican hood if he actually owned the CD, or planned on buying it soon. But His Pontifical Learnedness, who knows as much about ’80s metal as he knows about Nehemiah-son-of-Hacaliah, was waxing paranoiac about the RIAA’s ganging up on file-traders. ‘Their life burns faster, all they hear or see is laughter. Were they promised only lies?’ he asked me. And I guess I have no option but to admit that it’s a question I don’t know the answer to. What exactly is the RIAA up to? Well, here’s the fo-shizzy as I see it. The MP3 format isn’t for dorky college kids anymore. The newest batch of MP3 players, while they presuppose prior ownership of a computer, handles music more cheaply and stably than CD players do. The tradeoff in audio quality is too little for most of us to even notice. It’s convenient you don’t have to deal with your old copy of ‘Appetite For Destruction’ skipping as you flounce from SMG to Warren. You can find stuff online that you wouldn’t be able to find at Virgin Megastore. (The Pope wanted to rock the sanctum sanctorum with a rare recording of the ‘Miserere.’) And you can fit around 150 songs that is 149 more than The Buggles did that were hits onto a single CD-R. If you’d ever taken Economics in eighth grade like I did, you’d realize there’s a huge demand for MP3s. And most people, like the Ecclesiastical Grand Master, don’t even want to steal the stuff on KaZaA. Either their conscience troubles them, or it’s just one too many penis or breast enlargement advertisements than is good for self-confidence. But MP3s don’t just drop from heaven. You have to download them, and most of us wouldn’t mind paying the dollar or so that an officially purchased song would cost. Apple hit on the perfect answer to sell downloadable music at 99 cents per song on their ITunes.com service. It’s so simple, and such a great deal, that Apple is raking up legal tender like it’s empty beer cans in Allston. The overwhelming majority of us, however, are sheep that bow down to the Windows standard. And we have two options: a) We could spring for a new Mac for a $1,000 or so or b) we could just use one of the dozens of file-sharing programs to get what we want for free. You’d think that with such a gaping hole in the market, the RIAA would rise up to the occasion and try to sell MP3s. Well, not quite. The RIAA’s characteristically brilliant solution is to sue college students part of the demographic that buys the most CDs. Among other vicious thieves that the RIAA targetted was Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old honors student from New York, whose desperate poverty she lives in welfare housing must have driven her to her heinous transgressions. And while this is alienating the RIAA from its best customers, there’s no talk of actually coming up with a settlement (ha ha, like all those kids that were sued had to). In spite of Apple’s glaring example, in spite of publicly antagonizing so many factions, the RIAA is going ahead with what would calculatedly have been the dumbest possible option ever. And those of us who like music have no option except to either steal or do without. The solution for the RIAA is painfully obvious; for us, rather less so. All the advice I can give you is what I gave to the Pope. Download at will, but say two Hail Marys just in case.

Arafat Kazi, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.