I am not proud of this. My great-grandparents did not raft here from Kazakhstan so that generations later I would end up being a cream-cheese thief. It haunts me to this day, and my conscience, such as it is, disgorges that larcenous cream-cheese memory into my guilty brain every now and then like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story. Only more fattening.

The telltale cream cheese resurfaced last month when I went to visit a friend who wishes to remain anonymous (hereafter referred to as "my sister"). After I walked over the pizza boxes that I prayed were empty, avoided the rabid pet bunny and squeezed past the aquarium, whose water is so dark she doesn't know if any fish are still alive, the first thing I noticed in my sister's college apartment was the computer. There were many, many computers in this first room, but it was the one up front, the one that was cracked open and that my sister was lovingly caressing with canned air, that I found kind of disturbing. "Otherwise the 'N Sync songs will sound blurry," she explained. She doesn't know much about technology.

Actually, she does. This PC has more than a thousand songs on its hard drive — really, every rock song you can think of. And if you can somehow name one they don't have, my sister's roommates will feel challenged and download it within the next 10 minutes. The Library of Congress doesn't have employees this committed. Like every other college kid in America, my sister and her roommates have not paid for any of these tunes. They got them free on Napster and a bunch of other places where songs are swapped like answers to a stats exam. My sister isn't going to be happy about my talking about that stats thing.

All this free swapping has caused the music industry to go apoplectic. The recording execs and Metallica worry that soon no one will pay for music anymore. Earlier this year, in what may be one of the more futile legal maneuvers since the impeachment, the Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster and tried to shut it down. In July a federal court judge ordered Napster to halt the trading of copyrighted material, but the decision was stayed — which means, I guess, that it's O.K. for now to download free music. But later? It doesn't matter. The issues surrounding digital music — to swipe or not to swipe — are not legal or even technological so much as they are ethical. So what if Napster is shut down? Tons of new schemes have already come online that allow people to trade songs pretty easily — and unlike with Napster, there is no one to sue. There's even a promising underground technology called Aimster that allows the 61 million users of AOL's Instant Messenger to swap music, only untraceably, with the people on their buddy lists. How much of a crime can it be if you're doing it with a buddy?

So last week as I was walking up to the counter of my neighborhood music store with a handful of CDs, it struck me: Am I the last sucker left? Should I really be paying for tunes when I could just rip them off the Internet? Is the artwork on the Jennifer Lopez album really worth $15.99? Maybe. But it certainly isn't on the Tupac Shakur album. So I decided to put Tupac back on the shelf and went home, logged on and tried to download a couple of his hits.

And that's when the guilty part of me started to think about the cream cheese. But music isn't like cream cheese, the other, cheaper part of me responded. You can't spread it on a bagel. You can't even hold it in your hand. Can you really steal something metaphysical and heavily bass-driven? This was not going to be an easy question to answer.

Searching for a brother-in-arms to make me feel better about my impending new crime, I talked to Andrea Tambalotti, 27, a graduate student in economics at Princeton who was one of 300,000 people banned from Napster earlier this year for downloading Metallica songs — a high price indeed for Enter Sandman. "I didn't like their music lately anyway," Tambalotti said about the band. "And now every time I see Metallica, I think they're phonies. This metal band is supposedly all about rebelling, and then they got all upset when they were afraid of losing money."

These days Tambalotti is a fan of Public Enemy, a pro-Napster, music-just-wants-to-be-free band. "I don't like their music very much, but I like their image," he confessed. And he still doesn't think downloading the free music was wrong. "It's just like exchanging CDs among friends. It doesn't necessarily mean that downloading one song from Metallica means two less dollars go to Metallica." This sounded impressive coming from a guy who's getting his doctorate in economics.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the real reason Andrea and maybe I don't feel bad is this: we know we won't get caught. Downloading free music is like speeding in Montana. It's not even one of those crimes that would keep you from getting a seat on the Supreme Court, which, I have been arguing since the Clarence Thomas hearings, for reasons I'd rather not get into, should be the new ethical measuring stick.

After I hung up, I realized that calling a fellow criminal for ethical advice was a very Nixonian ploy. For a more objective take, I called the American Ethical Union, an organization that has been around since 1889 and that may or may not be a cult. The employee I reached, who had never heard of Napster, gave it some long thought, considered the two sides to the problem and then promised me that the union's president would call the next day with a comment. He never called. This pretty much ended my faith in the American Ethical Union.