[dissention]

Originally Posted by David

As far as I'm concerned, clips are fine -- or no clips at all, or whole songs, or even pretty pictures of people's houses with the juniper tree in the front yard.

The thing I've never particularly cared for during my decades of collecting & watching others collect is the nonsense of announcing you have something but can't, or don't intend to, share it. That's actually a better description of carrot-dangling. (In fact, some of us have an even more colorful term to describe that, but using it would be to flout the FAQ.) If you have something you know the rest of the fans would love to have but you have no intention of disseminating it, announcing it is bragging about it. Our parents & teachers were supposed to have taught us at very young ages that bragging is not nice. I remember a nice young lady a couple of years ago got involved in some sort of silliness over an unreleased Lindsey Buckingham song that was up for bid on eBay -- for whatever reason, the announcement was made here on this forum that the song would not be shared, which, as anyone would guess, resulted in a lot of resentment & flaming. People justifiably felt at the time, why was the announcement made? What good did it serve? The answer was obvious: it feels great to the person bragging. But it's not nice. It's rude. Things like this used to happen on Usenet, too. Fans had this or that & didn't want to or were bound not to share the stuff, but went ahead & chatted merrily about it anyway in a public forum ... to the extreme & justifiable annoyance of others.

It's something to think about. I sometimes catch myself bragging about something, & think, "David, you're being an ass. Cut it out." The compulsion to brag is extremely powerful, but it can be fought.

That was Peacekeeper from the ACLU sampler.

And the sma ething happens with Lindsey's version of Bill Yellow Taxi every once in awhile and the person bragging about it tells a tale about not being able to circulate it or else someone in the record biz will lose their job.