I Only Wanted The New NIN Album

Yesterday saw the release of Ghosts I-IV from NIN. Not only was this release not really publicised but it was also following in a similar track of Radio head and their In Rainbows album. Not quite a ‘pay what you feel’ option but some seriously price reduced DRM free chunage.

Being quite a closet NIN fan I wanted to download this, but I decided to go with the free 9 track starter pack and if impressed I would payz my wayz and invest further. But due to the popularity of the event my download was bumming out all over the place. I must have tried 30 times and not got further than 700kb of the 82mb download. Frustrated I turned to the only service I knew could help; sure enough Twitter came through.

Turns out that Trent had released an official copy of the album and it was on The Pirate Bay. So a torrent file later I’m enjoying the new NIN album. But it got me thinking, I’ve just downloaded music from a p2p service, will the feds be knock my door down tonight? With all the talk in the news of British ISP’s planning on cutting down and banning offenders of sharing music and files via peer sharing, where does this all end?

Of course p2p software uses certain ports which is where your ISP is looking, plus your excessively high bandwidth! I opened up those ports and joined the millions of users out there sharing files; legal or otherwise. Yet there was nothing illegal about my actions. I was following a free download, by the artist themselves, to a known torrent tracking website to download music in the most frowned upon manor. How will this all turn out? How will ISP’s know what is legal p2p sharing versus the illegal side?