Two bags with my favorite CDs, which I once assumed I would leave behind when I died, hopefully far into the future. Now in the trash they go.

Finished at last! Every CD I could find is ripped to the hard disk, and a backup is made to an external disk.  The CDs from USA and Europe are stuffed in bags to throw in the trash, those that are not there already.  I keep the Japanese ones, for now. I originally planned to keep the CDs from my favorite artists:  Enya, Leonard Cohen, Chris de Burgh.  They are all awesome, compared to pretty much anyone else, in that the consistently make good songs and perform them themselves with great enthusiasm.  And they fill up all or much of the CD with good songs instead of spacing it out with one good song and 9 boring on each CD. So I was really planning to keep them, until the Jammie Thomas judgment. Now I am not planning to have an American or European CD in the house ever again.  Nor do I intend to buy any from online shops like iTunes etc.  They had their chance, and they blew it.  This means war.

I have decided on Sound Converter, a Linux program, to make all the tracks into MP3 files for easy streaming.  The Opera Unite music streaming program only handles that format.  Unfortunately it also panics at the sight of non-ASCII characters.  Perhaps it thinks they are malicious code?  I am still not sure what to do with my Japanese music in that regard, I have found English translations for one (DearS) but may have to either translate or transliterate the others manually, a Herculean task, although not Sisyphean.  As it is, just converting the hundreds of non-Japanese CDs will likely take weeks, as my Linux CD at home is so old, it is slow even with Xubuntu.

Once the tracks are converted, I intend to use Opera Unite to stream them so my friends around the world can listen to them.  That’s illegal, of course: According to the recent Norwegian law about intellectual property, it is illegal to play music for your family. You can only perform copyrighted works at home if you do so “without the help of strangers”. Since your stereo is almost certainly made by strangers, using it to play for your spouse and kids could get you arrested.

That is not very likely though, because the police is locked up in a long struggle with the government.  They are refusing to work overtime – crimes should please be committed during office hours until further notice.   Things have been going sour over a very long time:  The Norwegian police was reorganized, as are pretty much every tentacle of government, including the one in which I worked.  And like that one, the police also found themselves doing more work for the same pay, and less meaningful work as well. As far as I know this has been the outcome of every “reorganization” in public sector in Norway, as it probably is everywhere else.  Anyway, after years of this they have had enough.  So they are doing only what they absolutely have to do.  And this means as long as we have crazy people running around doing actual crimes, there won’t be police left over to make sure I don’t let my best friends listen to my favorite music.