For example, take my so-called college life. At the beginning of the semester I was the least popular man on campus. The cute coed that sat next to me in my accounting class didn’t even know I was alive, and I was flunking my major – business administration. It looked like “Do you want fries with that,” was going to be a part of my professional vocabulary for all of my adult life.

Then I got this new roommate, a guy from the computer science department. Captain Pocket Protector. Always going on about bandwidth, bits and bytes. Gosh, what a geek.

At least, so I thought.

Until late one night, after about 12 or 30 brewskis, he started showing me how he could take over a portion of the university’s network and dedicate it to file-sharing. You know, like how people use Kazaa to trade songs by bands like Metallica and Slobberbone? Except this would be a private, student-only network. I didn’t understand the tech stuff, but I figured, what the hell, free music is free music. I was in.

Well, before long we had all the dorms on campus wired into our little network and the songs were flying back and forth across the ether. Sevendust, The Strokes, Wayne Newton, you name it, you could grab it. However, the expense of all the hardware and software was adding up. We needed money. And fast.

So we started charging our users a buck per semester. Heck, they couldn’t pay us quick enough. Our network grew to cover the entire campus. No matter where you were – the gym, student union, student rehab – if you wanted free music, like the latest from Iron Maiden or Sting, all you had to do was connect and download. Sweet.

Of course, all the local bars wanted to buy advertising, all 931 of them. But best of all, not only was I suddenly the most popular man on campus, but that cute coed in my accounting class gave me her phone number. I was the man!

That is, until the RIAA discovered our little operation and slapped me with a big fat lawsuit for copyright infringement. All those songs by major label acts like The Dead, Ryan Adams or Phish that my users traded over my network? The RIAA wanted to charge me $150,000 per. Can you believe it? Like the record labels don’t have enough money, you know?

On the other hand, I received an “A” in business, and Princeton, Yale and Harvard want me in their MBA programs. It’s funny how things turn out.