According to Title 17, Chapter 5, section 504c2 of the US copyright law, if you get caught with music that you have downloaded illegally from the Internet, you can get charged up to $150,000 per infringement. I thought I would do a little experiment to see how much I would be in for if my entire collection were to be found to be illegal.

Let's do some math. I have 3,876 tracks, at $150,000 each. So if my entire collection were to be found illegal, that means it would cost me $581.4 million dollars — about .6 billion dollars.

OK, let's assume that I can live with that reality. It just seems odd that I could have bought those songs for $3,876 on amazon.com, or iTunes.

Something isn't quite right here. Also, did I mention that all US digital music sales are estimated to total $2.9B in 2007? That makes my music worth about 20% of the 2007 revenue.