Filesharing reperation

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Lilsheep88

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Just wondering… I used to fileshare and for the longest time I was oblivious to the fact that it was stealing / a sin because it is so common this day and age. Ive already confessed to the sin and was absolved of it. As a penance, do I have to delete everything? Or can I just keep the stuff I have and completely stop from now on and buy my stuff as CDs or through itunes… I never distributed or sold stuff though. It was purely for self-use.

Note that this is digital, not physical. Does penance have to be eye for eye or tooth for tooh, or can it be substituted by another act of mercy. I know if the window is broken, you still have to fix it.

Ie: Can I do something else for an act of penance. Ie: an act of mercy? I plan to give a large Divine Mercy image to a church which cost me $130, expensive for me because I am on a student budget. I feel that this is more effective anyway in the long run because

A) the amount of things I downloaded are nothing close to those big time seeders. These items are so widespread on P2P networks that I doubt this will make any long run difference anyway if I deleted everything. Alot of the artits such as Drake actually said that they dont care about filesharing and actually contributes to their popularity.
B) Donating a Divine Mercy to a church is MUCH more beneficial to the souls of hundreds of people have access to that image.

The reason why I dont want to let go of these files so easily is that some of them cannot be obtained elsewhere, in addition to the effort of hunting down and these files. I have tried to look for them on itunes / other online stores but to no success. And technically, I have also paid extra for the bandwith on my internet bill every month.

Most of the files are not North American so I have to go out of my way to look for them. My brother also suggested that we can continue using progs such as frostwire but for every song downloaded from Frostwire form now on, give a dollar to the church (1 dollar 1 song)

Thoughts?
 
My first thought is that you should go to your confessor and let them assign a penance. The sacrament will give you the grace and ability to carry through with the penance, and it will also let you see it from the perspective of a person who likely knows you a lot better than we do in the anonymous forum.
 
My confessor doesnt seem tech-savvy and probably has no clue on how digital copyright laws work.
 
I will only share with you my personal experience and opinion.

If I were to go into a store and steal a CD from their shelf… I would later return that CD to the store I took it from if I realized the wrongness of what I’d done. I would not feel right keeping it.

Now, with file sharing, you can hardly return the product to it’s owner… so I made the decision to delete EVERYTHING I had downloaded illegally. 😦 Boy was that a hard decision to make but I’ve never looked back.

Although you have repented you still possess stolen goods. Think about that for a bit and the right choice will come to you. … the question is, are you willing to listen to your conscience?
 
My conscience is telling me that I take hpthe Divine Mercy route
 
In Canada you pay a tax on each blank CD that you buy to compensate the artists/producers of the music for losses from copying. Whether you purchased CD’s, I do not know, but it’s possible that you at least paid something for the work.

I had to face this problem a long time ago. I had a library of illicitly downloaded music at one time not seeing anything wrong with it, but most of it was things that I had already purchased in the past and I didn’t listen to most of it anyway. I eventually repented and deleted everything that I did not pay for. I also paid for any software that I acquired wrongly and continued to use. Most software that I had installed was software that I never used, but just played with a couple of times to try it out. That was all deleted. I still don’t believe in paying for software before you can use it since so much software is worthless. That was an expensive lesson to learn all at once, however. The laborer should not be denied his wage, even though virtual media is a different animal of sorts.

Donating a Divine Mercy image is good, but maybe you can go through the music and see if it’s spiritually uplifting to begin with. A lot of the music I had came with some tribute to satan in the cd/tape insert, or even in the lyrics of some songs, and I destroyed all of that.

Anything that is impossible to acquire elsewhere could be viewed in a different way. The artists would not be losing anything if you couldn’t buy it in the first place, so I’m not exactly sure how that would be considered stealing in any legitimate sense, even in the weird world of music industry copyright where people are called thieves for legitimately copying a CD to their ipods. If an artist/producer has encouraged the spread of certain music, then that can hardly be considered stealing as well.
 
Your right about the Blank CD Tax thing

If I lived in the US and filesharign was explicitly a sin… then yes I would be guilty of “breaking the law of my lands”. But in Canada, filesharing is technically a grey area…

I have already UNINSTALLED my P2P progs and STOPPED filesharing once and for all Legal or not.

And most of the stuff I listen to are house / meditational instrumental music. I have some rap and rock but thats not my focus anymore. I still listen to it occasionally.I also have some music from abroad which I acquired online since I cant find it here. I dont have any movies and it is strictly music.
 
You should delete the music which you have not paid for, or you should obtain legal copies - CD or digital download through services such as iTunes. To retain that which you have no right to have means you continue to benefit from theft and thereby you reinstate the sin for which you were absolved.

You simply can’t have your cake and eat it.

Do you think that if you’d stolen a car and used it for a while, you would be off the hook if you then confessed the theft, got absolution for the act of thieving and yet kept on using the car which you had no right to use? Your confession would have been worthless and the absolution itself would have been non-existant since you had no intention of handing the car over to its lawful owner. You would, in fact, have lied in confession when you promised the priest AND GOD that you had a firm purpose of amendment. And THAT is, sad to say, a mortal sin.

It’s very different from confessing something you have a weakness for, trying hard not to do whatever it is for at least some time and then failing. In this case you still retain the stolen goods and you had every intention of keeping them. What was the point of going to Confession in the first place?

Obviously you can’t ‘return’ digital files. But you can delete them so that the effect is as if you’d never had them in the first place.

Your restitution is NOT to give an expensive picture to a Church and to retain something that you still shouldn’t have.

I’m sorry to come over harsh, but basically it looks very much like you’re trying to wriggle out of your responsibilities.

Keep the expensive picture: I think you need it. Delete the stolen music. Your soul really does NOT need that.
 
Just for information, if you want free music (or very nearly free), use a streaming service like Spotify, if it’s available in Canada. You can listen to as many tracks as you like by pretty much every artist you’ve ever heard of, entirely legally. It’s paid for by interstitial advertisements, like a commercial radio station, except you get to decide what gets played. There’s plenty of ‘meditative’ styles of music on there.
 
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