I haven't owned a working turntable in 15 years. My record albums have moved between three houses in that time, packed away in crates gathering dust in the basement. I've gone years without even thinking of them. But after returning home from a store that specialized in refurbished stereo equipment with a beautiful Technics record player, I retrieved the crates from their hiding places and began spreading albums across my dining room table.

And I started to freak out a little bit. All those albums! All that personal history laid out before me. That "Ziggy Stardust" record -- I remembered playing it for the first girl I had a crush on. That Skynyrd album -- would I ever have owned it if I hadn't been a teenager in north Florida? "Entertainment," by the Gang of Four -- just a glimpse of it reminded me of a brutal breakup. It was as if, as an acquaintance who'd had a similar experience noted later, I had discovered a room in my house that I'd forgotten existed.

My original plan had been to choose an album to rip and then write about it, but the memory vault was just too distracting. I started randomly listening to cuts, reminding myself of how I became the person I am today. Like a breakthrough mental therapy session, the explosion of albums from my past set my consciousness astir, an experience both exhilarating and destabilizing.

My kids bugged out when they came home from school and saw all the records strewn across the dining room. But then my daughter turned on the computer because she wanted to listen to some music. And I was a little sad to realize that there would never be a similar trip down memory lane for her.

As a full-fledged member of the digital generation, her music, her pictures, her video, will all be on the hard drive. The only thing that will tie her to the data that will help define her identity will be her ownership of it -- her ability to retrieve that data when and where she wants it. And in a digital age, such ownership is a fragile thing, under constant attack and frighteningly vulnerable -- not just to lawyers, but also to computer crashes and format changes.

If the entertainment studios had their way, every time a format changed, you'd have to buy all your records all over again. In their ideal world, we would hold restricted licenses to our content, not ownership. Digital rights management would cripple our all-powerful computers, creating backups would be impossible, and the basic human impulse to share the wealth of information that helps define who we are would be beset with obstacles. This is not paranoia. At every step of the way, intellectual-property-right holders have resisted technological innovations that give ordinary people more scope to enjoy and consume music, television, movies or any other content.

That's why MGM vs. Grokster is so important. The deeper we get into the digital age, the more we will be defined not by our relationships with physical objects but with the data that we have accumulated in our journeys through life. If we lose the right to own that data and do what we want with it, if the power of the computer, and the Net, is taken from us, we're at risk of losing a lot more than a few files -- we stand at risk of losing the evidence that tells us who we are.

The chore of ripping vinyl is a quick lesson in what a pain in the ass the analog, pre-digital lifestyle really was. But it's also a reminder, in case anyone has forgotten, of the marvelousness of the computer.

The first shocker is that to record an album on one's hard drive, you actually have to play it in real time! Again, my kids -- who, just before leaving on a road trip over the weekend burned two albums to CD in about three minutes -- were befuddled. Real-time is slow. Digital is not slow.

But if you manage to get your album converted to some kind of humongous, uncompressed file, then you are faced with all kinds of subsidiary questions. Do you try to clean up the cracks and pops? What format do you compress the file into? How do you divide up the tracks?

Ripping vinyl is a time-consuming task that demands attention and requires getting up to speed on audio-editing software. But that it's possible at all is astonishing. The fact that I can look at the waveform for Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" and not only see that annoying, nasty popping sound just before the guitar solo, but delete it right out of existence, was eye-opening. Gee, having transformed that analog record to a digital file gives me all sorts of power, doesn't it? Now I can sample it, cut and paste it, mash it up with other songs, rip it to CD, e-mail it to my friends, post it on a publicly accessible Web server.

Whoops -- might not want to do that last part, or a nastygram from the Recording Industry Association of America could soon follow. But you get my point, right? That amazing protean device, the computer, gives me digital omnipotence. And that phenomenal distribution network, the Internet, contains all the software, and all the wisdom necessary to use that software to wreak my magic and share the fruits of my labor with the world.

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