What to do with 1,200 CDs I don't need

**After doing some research, it appears that no matter how one wishes to rationalize their actions, it is clearly a violation of applicable law to possess a copy without also possessing the original...**

That seems impossible. What about buying ONLY a digital version (I-Tunes, etc.)??

In the digital realm - ones and zeroes - the concept of original and copy does not exist. They're exactly the same.

When you buy a CD, you're not buying the piece of plastic (or whatever it's made out of), you're buying the right to listen to it. If you copy your songs to your hard drive, you still have a right to listen to that music; you paid for it. The digital recording on the hard drive is (theoretically) identical to that on the plastic; original, copy, same thing. What happens to that plastic should be irrelevant.

What happens if you keep your CDs and they're lost to theft. Are you supposed to go and delete your digital copies because you no longer have "the original?"

You might try one of the new cd trading sites such as lala.com for example. Highly recommended. Each trade costs $1. They are currently in beta but you can sign as a beta user.

Re: my last post, I should point out that lala(.com) pays up to 20c per trade to the artist.

The statement I agree with most since my last post was made by Meisterkleef:

"If there were no such thing as file sharing, I doubt this issue would even be on the radar screen."

I'm kinda surprised by the number of people who are so sincerely concerned about this, to the point of declaring they haven't bought used music since they were starving students. For a vinyl record collector like me, this is almost inconceivably ludicrous -- there are literally tens of thousands of records from the past that are unavailable any other way. Besides which, I'm a firm believer that all publicity is good publicity when it comes to sales, and that limited dissemination beyond one's own ears of music that one has bought will ultimately help, not hurt, the artist. If I throw a party and spin records at it, BMI and ASCAP will never hear from me, but someone in attendance might be inspired to go out and buy something I played. If I burn a compilation CD-R and give copies to friends, same deal. And who here hasn't bought recorded music used and as a result been inspired to buy more from that artist new, or go see them in concert? Most of the hypotheticals described above are too extreme to reflect reality. The only real exception is file-sharing, which is extreme.

Do the moral worriers here also disapprove of libraries? Because of digital, we seem to be hand-wringing our way toward rewriting the history of intellectual property in Western civilization...

"Do the moral worriers here also disapprove of libraries?"

No. But you are not permitted to photocopy library books, nor to borrow CDs and tapes and duplicate them. You may borrow them, then give them back, but not retain a copy as Herman is proposing to do.