Why piracy is a habit I just can’t break

My first illegal download was either a copy of Wake Me Up Before you Go-Go or Build Me Up Buttercup.

I can’t remember. Regardless, neither is a really cool first download, though my music tastes have never really been cool, despite the infinite catalogue Internet piracy has afforded me since adolescence.

I was 13 and I just got my first computer that was mine alone — and a high-speed Internet connection to boot. My mom was either too naïve or too tired to monitor my Internet activity, so I pretty much had free rein online. And ever since I watched that song creep towards completion in the summer of 2001, I’ve been hooked on free content. That song likely took 30 minutes to load, but in those days that was almost instantaneous.

Limewire served as my portal to free music throughout my teen years, first with terrible pop songs old and new. It served me through my Motown, Beatles and oldies phase, into my hiphop era, bad punk covers and SoCal phase, and well into my whinier, late-teen years and angsty, indie bands like Death Cab for Cutie, Sufjan Stevens, Something Corporate, the Decemberists and Stars.

Illegal downloads are how I discovered my love of folk and blues, and learned that Bob Dylan’s cover of Eric Von Schmidt’s Baby Let Me Follow You Down was and remains one of my favourite songs.

Internet access was a gateway to illegal music downloads and yes, eventually porn. The first time I saw fullon penetrative sex I was trying to download a copy of OTown’s We Fit Together. What I got was most certainly not a boyband dancing on a boat.

That was back in the days when downloading a video was a daylong task. By firstyear university, I was blowing my way through downloaded cable shows like The Tudors. I managed to kill a computer with spamware that took over while I was trying to illegally stream an episode of America’s Next Top Model.

My now common-law partner and I spent the first few months of our courtship entangled on his futon watching a pirated copy of HBO’s The Wire.

Then streaming services came along that made downloading TV shows, movies and music faster and easier. Despite that — and the fact I work in an industry that is being killed by free content — I remain an online pirate. I still illegally download a number of the television programs that I watch.

That’s not because I don’t want to pay for content — I would happily subscribe to HBO’s streaming service if it were available in Canada, or Hulu, or if AMC had an equivalent here. Or maybe that’s just another of the little lies I tell myself, because, like smoking, piracy is a bad habit born of my youth that I still can’t kick.