FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for April 18, 2024

Whose side is Peter on — Jason’s or Paige’s?

that’s it – he’s dead.

There was a teenager in my town whose family had to pay $16k because he pirated an album and burned a few CDs. I’d hear similar stories all around the country. I doubt the record companies were hurting that bad, just needed to send a message. Didn’t really stop my brother (allegedly).

Wasn’t there a strip where Jason shared a MP3 file on Napster (or whatever it was called in the FoxTrot-iverse) of the BackSynch Boys song labeled Metalica?

Jason may have gone too far this time.

Time for a new BBQ, unless they like their plastic medium rare !

So when Paige finds out, will Jason be forced to buy her new ones?

And this is on the heels of Jason’s iguana eating her Backsync Boys signed photograph. Jason likes to live dangerously.

The first thing I did when I got a (very expensive) CD was convert my audio tape and LP collections to CD. Once I had software that would break the copy protection on certain CDs, I made copies of audio CDs and put the originals away. With the arrival of iTunes and high capacity (500 MB to one glorious gigabyte, who would ever need more storage space than that?), I dumped all digitalized audio to a hard drive. Note that iTunes was a primary way of breaking copy protection; Stevie Jobs hated copy protection with the fury of 10,000 suns, so he pulled a fast one: users could NOT just copy CDs, but could assemble ‘playlists’… and could burn the playlists to CDs up to 7 times. And there wouldn’t be any copy protection on the burned CDs. Audio from the burned CDs could be re-imported into iTunes, with no copy protection and no limits on what could be done. And audio from the Apple Music Store had copy protection… until users created a playlist and burned that playlist to CD.

When this strip first ran, all my music was in digital formats, on a hard drive, with copies on CD. And, so long as I didn’t put it out where the RIAA could see it, they had no clue that I had it, and there was NOTHING that they could do about it. And as every single track had been bought and paid for, I was legal; the RIAA wanted to charge for audio tape, charge for the same album on LP, charge again for CD, charge again for DAT, and charge one more time for ‘digital downloads.’ They got to make one sale to me, and after that, the album was on a hard drive attached to my home server and available to everyone on my home network… but not to anyone else.

And if the RIAA didn’t like it (and they didn’t) , well, how sad, too bad, bite me.

heh, this reminds me of modern day tik-tok and twitter trends where people “protest” by burning or destroying products from companies they don’t approve of…except they had to buy those products, therefore giving the company their money

Jason is willing to go to prison for his crime

Jason is going to end up getting burned.

… and no punishment from his parents apparently.

Zap ‘em in the microwave! It’s much more spectacular (note: likely not good for your microwave and definitely not good for your lungs).

Don’t do it, Jason!

Actually, I thought Paige would think this is how a CD recording is burned.

I was burning CDs till just a few years ago, when my car’s CD changer up and died on me.

She’ll thank him later.

I remember reading this one originally

Lots of toxic black smoke for the neighbors to complain about, Jason.

Just setting a fire unsupervised could get most 10-year-olds in trouble.

“Just this once”? You’re FREQUENTLY dumb, Jason.

Paige will probably burn him up when she finds out he burned all her BSB CD’s. Then Mom will put him in permanent poverty until he repays her.