Is Peer-to-Peer Downloading Just Digital Gluttony?

On a message board for the group People With An Absurdly Large Music Collection on last.fm, a user with the handle AndretheDark boasts of his hoard of 30,281 songs. It would take him 94 days to listen to each one. With a catalogue of more than 75,000, Pale_Court has him beat. She writes that her music pile takes up 368 gigabytes of space, and counting.

In the era of hard drives measured in terabytes, anything less than 10,000 songs is modest. Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, says larger hard drives are pushing the number of illegal downloads worldwide past the 15-billion-song mark, and some are gorging at the trough with insatiable appetites.

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