Earlier this week I had a really long day. The kids at school were crazy, several teachers being out sick made it worse, and my back was aching, so I was generally a grump all day. I came home tired, stressed out, and really not looking forward the fact that I had about 12 hours to eat, sleep, shower, and get myself back to my job once again.

So of course I escaped to my Internet addiction and checked email. My friend Justin turned my night -- my whole week, really -- around by forwarding me a link to the cutest, cleverest, happiest thing I'd seen in ages. A pair of guys out there in Cyberspace had taken some old Peanuts cartoon footage (I think it's all from A Charlie Brown Christmas, but I'm not positive), stripped the original music out, and edited it to OutKast's hit song, Hey ya!. Brilliant. I'm a big OutKast fan and an even bigger Peanuts fan, and I couldn't have been more delighted to see Snoopy and Linus shakin' it to Andre 3000's neo-funk beats.

The piece ended with author credits and a simple, honest admission that the source material -- both audio and visual -- was made by someone else, copyrighted by someone else, and used entirely without permission. The Quick Time clip closes with the simple plea, "Used without permission. Please don't sue us."

OutKast, the estate of Charles Schultz (the late, great creator of Peanuts), the Vince Guarldi Trio (who performed the original Peanuts music, a snippet of which is heard at the beginning of the movie), the ABC television network (whose logo appears throughout -- the cartoon was obviously taped off of a television broadcast), and a whole host of other copyright holders probably have legal grounds upon which to sue these guys. United Media has already sent out a cease- and-desist, and the clip is now no longer available on the Internet. (Well, not from its original authors, anyway).

Why, you ask, am I giving even more attention to this act of blatant copyright infringement, and potentially driving you to search for this digital contraband even though it's already cost United Media time and money to have taken out of circulation?

Two reasons, both of which were highlighted in cover stories in two of the past three Sunday's New York Times Magazine. First, copyright law is undergoing an historical sea change right now, and the debates surrounding the future of royalities, the public domain, and the like all have to do with the accessibility and flexibility of digital media. Second, computer worms and viruses wreaked unprecedented havoc on our network-dependent world in 2003, and security experts are predicting far more mayhem in 2004 and years to come.

What ties these two topics together isn't just the advances in computing technology that have made them so possible and prominent. It's also the human creative spirit that fuels the artisitic and intellectual fervor behind remixing pop songs and writing clever code that can replicate itself as quickly as possible across as many of the world's computers as possible. We have always been fueled by curiosity -- to paraphrase a speech from The West Wing, We came out of the cave, saw fire over the hill, and went to see what it was -- and the spirit of invention. Scientists, researchers, artists, and writers, we all strive to understand our world and represent that understanding in ever new forms. Of course, everything we create borrows in some way from what's come before us, but the pride and joy of creation comes in the act of producing something that somehow, in some way, feels uniquely worthy of being noticed amidst all that's preceded it.

The guys who remixed the Peanuts video may have been looking for some free publicity for their production company, but they weren't directly selling any product they made from Charles Schultz' and OutKast's work. They did what the iTunes music store and umpteen pornography sites are so smartly doing, and what desparate giants like the RIAA are so sadly failing to do -- witnessing the changes in technology, observing how consumers are adopting them (legally or not) and then adapting their business models to meet these new consumer desires.

Apple Music Dot Com is a hit because paying 99 cents for a song is less expensive to many people than the time and hassle of finding and downloading that same song through less convienient means. To some it's also about legality and morality, but not to everyone. It's sheer economics -- if it takes me two minutes to log in, find my song, and hit the download button, but it takes me twenty minutes to complete the same process via Limewire or KaZaa, aren't those eighteen minutes of my life worth at least a dollar? For many people, the difference is even more dramatic because iTunes is point-and-click Web browsing and Peer-to-Peer file sharing requires some knowledge of how your computer actually works.

As this article in yesterday's New York Times points out, "Thousands of Web sites are putting Playboy magazine's pictures on the Internet - free. And Randy Nicolau, the president of Playboy.com, is loving it. 'It's direct marketing at its finest,' he said." The unauthorized pictures, Mr. Nicolau says, drive their desire-fueled viewers back to Playboy's site for more, and that's when Playboy profits.

Renegades like pornographers, underground musicians, and computer programmers have long been on the forefront of clever technology because they have to be. Whether their motivation is making sure they turn a profit in a shady (but legal) business, finding a way to come up with a new twist on an old sound, or solve the myriad intellectual puzzles involved in the art of code writing, these folk know that when new technologies spawn new laws written in hopes of exercising some governmental control over that technology, the technologists will always outpace the legislators. And the wiley individual retains his edge over the corporate behemoth, to boot ... Remember when the "uncopiable" CD came out last year and some kid in Europe cracked the code by literally drawing a ring around the disc with a Sharpie? Yeah, good use of R&D dollars there.

Clive Thompson's article on virus writers -- mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings, mostly living in rural Europe -- was interesting because for most of the coders the lure of writing a potentially devastating piece of computer code has nothing to do with erasing data or bringing down national security systems. It's the joy of solving a puzzle, of creating something cool, and showing it off to your like-minded friends. Actually, for many of these kids, Net-enabled hacking allowed them to make friends in the first place. The article details gatherings in which these coders hang out, drink beer, and talk about girls like teenagers all over the world do. It just so happens that before they discovered coding -- and other coders like them hanging out online -- they didn't have any friends to hang out and act like kids with.

Most of the coders interviewed for the article adhere to a sort of unwritten code of ethics that involves attached benign "payloads" to their programs. That is, instead of creating a worm that will find its way to millions of computers and erase all of their hard drives, the worm will instead deliver to all of those machines some sort of sophomoric (a .jpeg of a middle finger) or anti-capatlistic message (i.e. an anti-Microsoft screed). Granted, the movement of the worms itself across the Interent is enough to cause all sorts of financial and social harm by jamming communication networks. The top coders are also legally savvy enough now not to actually deploy their viruses, but rather to post the code to their Websites with "for educational uses only" disclaimers about the illegality of actually using the programs. The code on the site might carry benign payload, but altering it to deploy something more lethal isn't all that hard.

Of course, to a teenage wannabe rebel hacker, this is an open invitation to destruction akin to the lure being handed a loaded weapon. To quote Thompson's article, "The code for a virus is itself the weapon. You could read it in the same way you read a book, to help educate yourself about malware. Or you could set it running, turning it instantly into an active agent. Computer code blurs the line between speech and act. "It's like taking a gun and sticking bullets in it and sitting it on the counter and saying, 'Hey, free gun!'" Rogers says." (The Rogers quoted here is Marc Rogers, a computer forensics researcher at Purdue University.)

This threat is very true and very real. For all of the bored, puzzle-solving coders living in the hills of Eastern Europe, there are probably many more less talented but more nefarious-minded "script kiddies" lurking about just waiting for the blueprints to some new ubervirus to show up online so he can modify and deploy it to take out Los Angeles' 911 systems as part of some horrific plan of destruction.

Struggling with morality and ethics has long been the stuff great writers and lonely insomniacs have been made of, and technology doesn't change that. Technology is, however, making the speed at which we live our lives faster, and therefore making the impact of our moral choices that much more immediate and widespread. Somewhere in Washington, D.C. a politician is drafting a bill that one day will become the law of the land when it comes to digital copyrights and free speech online. This law will attempt to govern everything from the legality of moving the new OutKast song from your iBook to your iPod without paying Apple an extra 10 cents to the legality of posting viral code to the Net without actually deploying it. This is big stuff, scary stuff, the stuff of our future.

But also somewhere perhaps in America or Austria or Eastern Europe, a deejay is remixing another tune off the OutKast album, a political activist is splicing together video bytes of elected officials lying to the public, and a good-hearted coder is writing viruses and then sending them to Internet security organizations to help ramp up the Net's immune system. Art and science, good and evil, life and death. The Internet didn't create these forces, it just lets us share them with one another a little more easily.

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Noah Kravitz is an educator, musician, and writer who calls Brooklyn, NY home and takes his iPod with him everyday on the commute to work at a school in Spanish Harlem. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Teaching and Learning with Technology and the drummer for Automat, who can be found rocking various clubs in the five boroughs and beyond.