I pay for music, movies and software — even though I know how to download all of them for free. Sometimes it bothers me that I could be getting all of this stuff for free, I admit, and I know plenty of people who are more than content to download whatever they want. But I’ve come to the conclusion that paying for intellectual property makes good financial sense.

I work with Photoshop a lot. Back in college, I may have used a version of a less-than-legal nature, but I’ve found that legitimate software has paid off. For one thing, I haven’t had to spend any time getting a cracked copy to work. And if something does go horribly wrong with my software, I can call up tech support and get someone trained to handle this type of issue to sort out for me. There are updates, patches and more, as well.

There is a major drawback to buying music online, of course: DRM. Because of the way that most companies run their digital rights management systems, they have to update them every few years. Once a new type of DRM is being used, most companies stop supporting the old one — making songs sold with that particular DRM effectively useless. The situation is getting better, though. Last year, Apple switched to selling music free of DRM, as has Wal-Mart and many other venues. If you can manage to avoid buying DRM-free music (and you remember to back them up), you won’t have to re-purchase your music. The price remains comparable to buying CDs, as long as I want every track on an album, but it’s still an amount I feel comfortable paying.

When it comes to movies, I’ll admit my tastes have certainly dictated where I get my entertainment. Back in the days when I was willing to search through torrents for a particular movie or show, I could only rarely find the films I really wanted to watch. When I did, it was usually impossible for me to get the full file for some reason or another. I turned to Netflix in order to actually watch the movies that I wanted to see, instead of banging my head against the Bit Torrent wall. Netflix has only gotten better these days: now that I can watch movies immediately on my computer, I get a lot of the benefits of downloading movies, without having them take up half my hard drive.

And I do download plenty of stuff for free still — I just do it legally. There are thousands of musicians who release their tunes for free online, and the same goes for software and movies. I often look for Creative Commons-licensed media when I want something new. Even better, I often find stuff that really is new to me this way.

What do you think? I won’t ask you to incriminate yourself on whether or not you download music illegally, but do you think that it makes sense financially to take one approach over the other? Do you think that there’s anything wrong with downloading intellectual property of any kind? I’ve virtually ignored the possibility of legal fees here, I’ll admit, but I don’t really think they play in to the decision to download — do you?

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