Confession is good for the soul, or so I've heard said. No doubt one should be careful in choosing the audience to whom one is going to confess, but I'll throw caution to the wind and make a public confession. So without further ado, I confess the following.

I posses a modest collection of MP3 (audio) files of dubious legality with respect to copyright.

The whole "MP3 revolution", if one may call it that, has mostly passed me by. I wouldn't describe myself as a music junkie, and I observed the technological progress of good quality compressed audio and file sharing with a somewhat detached interest. I also observed the rise of lawsuits relating to file sharing with the same kind of detached interest. Anyone who follows these developments will be aware that we now have open legal warfare over matters of copyright between the recording industry and the general public (see, for instance, boycott-riaa.com and the EFF's "RIAA v. The People").

But all this is only tangentially related to my confession. I'm not sharing any copyrighted files openly on the Internet, so it's unlikely that the copyright police will beat down my door and confiscate my computer. My modest little MP3 collection owes its "dubious" status with respect to copyright for entirely different reasons. But before I get to the point, I'm going to tell you a bit about the kind of music I have in the MP3 format.

I think that most people have a natural tendency to like the music they heard as a teenager. For me, "teenager" slotted into the 1980s, but I'm not your typical case. In terms of "pop music", I have a small collection of CDs from roughly that era, but it's eclectic and nerdy, not mainstream: "Sky", "Jean-Michel Jarre", and "Yello". I was also impressed with the works of Harold Faltermeyer and Giorgio Moroder, although I do not own any of their works (not for lack of trying at the time). If those names don't mean anything to you, I have two words for you: "Top Gun". I don't think I've ever sat through that movie from beginning to end, but the opening music is gripping. Those two names are also behind a range of other things you've probably heard, even if you haven't heard the names themselves.

Funnily enough, a significant range of music from the first half of the twentieth century also makes its way into my "soft spot" zone. I have, for example, an absolutely unaccountable affinity for Bing Crosby, although all the other crooners of the era I can take or leave. It's possible that some of this influence can be attributed to an early exposure to the pianola. A dear old lady in my street (in my pre-teen years), who was something of a surrogate grandmother to me, owned a pianola and a goodly collection of rolls. My personal favourite tune was "Baby Face", and no pianola-pedaling session was complete without it. I loved that contraption with a passion. I would pedal the bellows, the roll would scroll, the keys would go up and down, and spectacular music would issue forth. Do you want to know if your eight-year-old is a nerd? See how long he can maintain an infatuation with a pianola. "Pianolas and pinball machines" just about summarises my obsessions at age eight.

But none of the above nostalgia accounts for any of my MP3 collection. The kind of music which I usually prefer to hear as I work (if I grow tired of silence) comes from a website called remix.kwed.org. This is the central hub of a group of people who are disconcertingly similar to me, in terms of musical tastes. The vast majority of people who contribute to and download from this site fell under the influence of the Commodore 64 computer as teenagers in the early eighties. In addition to being a great tinker-toy, the Commodore 64 had an impressive range of games, and the games had an impressive range of music. So, in some sense, the composers that have had the longest-lasting influence on me are the likes of Rob Hubbard and his contemporaries. This passing reference will be utterly obscure to you unless you were a part of the Commodore 64 gaming demographic, in which case you'll be nodding and reminiscing about your favourite bit of computer game music.

So I listen to MP3 recordings of computer game music. But understand that these are not recordings of a Commodore 64, but rather arrangements by third parties of said music. There are orchestral arrangements, jazz arrangements, heavy rock arrangements, and the more traditional synthesiser-type arrangements. The arrangements which are a more radical departure from the original sound tend to be the more popular ones. One of the contributors arranges the tunes in a style which is highly reminiscent of Jean-Michel Jarre's original "Oxygene" album, which I doubly appreciate.

And now, finally, to the point of the matter, being that this collection of MP3s is on shaky ground with regards to copyright. Why? Because they are unauthorised derived works. I don't actually anticipate anyone getting sued over the matter, mostly because the material in question is ridiculously obscure, and the copyright holders of the original works (who are almost certainly not the composers, since this was done as work for hire) would have a very hard time showing any actual damage caused by this practice. Even so, the creation of all these recordings involved a technical breach of copyright, so far as I can tell.

That's part of the present concern with copyright: we've privatised our shared culture. It seems odd to talk about computer games and their music as "cultural heritage", but I'm sure that it seems odd to talk about any phenomenon as "cultural heritage" at the time. For a certain demographic of thirty-somethings, these pieces of music are the very embodiment of happy teenage memories. I won't here begrudge the copyright holders of such product their government-granted privilege (I refuse to call it a "right") to control it for limited times, but it's sick and sad that said privilege continues well beyond the time that these things have become objects of nostalgia.

I'm inclined to think that the best copyright terms ever legislated were those in the Statute of Anne: a term of fourteen years, renewable for another fourteen if the author was still alive. Under that scheme, the copyright on all those early-to-mid eighties games would likely have expired at the turn of the century, given that they no longer have any commercial value (the Commodore 64 craze having been over for some time now). This would have left nostalgic thirty-somethings room to share reminiscences with a clear conscience.

But such is not to be, and so I salve my guilty conscience with confession. Although I have not yet publicly contributed an MP3 arrangement of a Commodore 64 game, and am thus technically clean, I have still downloaded and enjoyed these works of dubious legality. Please don't tell my mother — she doesn't read this website.