How do over 3GB worth of music sound blasting from those earphones — did you steal those too? That’s not counting the 10GB+ worth of Heroes episodes you ripped off of DC++, your ever-growing collection of movies you downloaded from Mininova and your still leeching Windows 7 incomplete file. Put down your protest signs pushing for an increase in Cornell’s monthly bandwidth cap just so you can torrent some more and listen to my case.

Yeah, I’m talking to you, information thief.

Technology came accompanied by pick-pocketing ninjas disguised by numbers and programming codes ready to steal your goods and services. And you? You’re part of this exponentially expanding army. Not just a soldier, but, as an average college student, you’re the general, the one leading the pack.

Okay, okay, maybe it’s not as bad as I’m making it sound. But it’s not as good as you’re making yourself believe it sounds. Have the pirated mp3s of Fame drowned out our conscience, that little voice in our heads that told us “That’s stealing!” and “Would you steal the same CDs from a retail store?”

I’ll admit: I’ve downloaded music illegally. But over the last year, because of a growing guilty conscience, double-clicking the “download” link is almost like walking to the nearest music store, hiding a record into the inside pocket of my puffy jacket and running home as quickly as I can. I say “almost” because I understand that those .torrent files aren’t tangible objects that are irreplaceable (like actual CDs are). But I also understand that not paying for something that has a price is one form of theft.

Your pirating may not directly hurt the recording industry, but indirectly, there are consequences.

For one, you’re preventing the record labels from making profits. You’re depriving A&M, Jive, Def Jam and other companies of the resources used during the making of each and every song, album and video.

Second, let me allow Lily Allen to take the stand. The singer said to NME Magazine, “The music industry is run by a bunch of fucking idiots and if you’re giving these people less money they are going to invest in bands that aren’t very good. The more money there is in the industry, the more they are going to have to invest in quality bands.” So, I guess if you want album shelves to be riddled with Sean Kingstons and T-Pains for the rest of our lives, then continue being your burglar self.

Here’s a solution. In 2007, Radiohead released their seventh record In Rainbows on their website with an empty price tag. Fans were given the opportunity to pay any amount they saw fit for the album, a democratization of music previously unheard of and a possible answer to the issue of illegal downloading. Averaging $6 per album sold, according to Wired, In Rainbows outsold their previous two albums, showing that maybe if the prices of albums were approximately halved to $6, people would be buying much more and stealing much less.

Of course, I can’t win this battle against piracy alone. I’m going to need intel. With the digital age still gaining more followers, BitTorrent releasing updated versions of their seeding software every couple of months and Hulu now announcing that they will start charging for their content in 2010, more and more people will turn to the option that reads “FREE” — ignorant or apathetic to the fine print that says — “… with the sacrifice of morality and quality.”

It’s time we take the illegal downloading sector of technology down. Take a few bucks out of your bank account, spare a few coins and make a change.