We ended last week pondering the following moral/legal dilemma: you purchase a music CD, but after a year’s listening (and maybe one too many times being thrown “coverless” into the glove box) the CD has become scratched, turning every song on it into a stuttering rap tune. But it’s your favorite CD. The rationalization process begins, of course, in the form of an impish little guy in a red suit, sitting on your left shoulder.

He whispers, “C’mon. It’s easy. Just install Kazaa, download the songs, and burn them onto a CD to replace the old one. After all, you purchased the CD once last year, so you’ve already paid for the music. Oh, and never mind the adware, spyware, and pop-up windows that get installed along with Kazaa. It’ll make your life better. Trust me. In fact, I have some friends who want to show you some interesting stuff. Sure, bring the kids”.

POOF. In your right ear you hear a sweet voice, belonging, of course, to a small, angelic figure. She calmly explains, “You know better than that. You read in Pete’s article that when you purchased that music CD last year you only purchased an authorized copy of the music – you owned the CD but not the music on it. Downloading that music would be wrong.”

Snarling from your left shoulder, “What does she know? Look, everybody’s doing it. Yeah, they’ve caught a couple of people and sued them, but they’ll never catch you.”

You get the idea. Let’s look at some other common rationalizations that frequently surface among “digital folks” when discussing digital file “sharing”. Remember, we’ve talked about music, TV, and movies, but file “sharing” also includes other copyrighted material like still images and software. I’ll lump them all together, because some of them are inter-related.

“Hey, it’s not like I’m selling it or giving it to others. As long as I’m using it myself, I’m not hurting anybody.”

“The music and software industries are huge mega-monopolies. They make billions of dollars a year. They certainly won’t miss a few dollars of revenue here and there.”

“I’ll just download this software program and use it as a trial version and evaluate it. If I like it, I’ll buy it later.”

“Art is meant to be shared. You can’t own art.”

OK. Undoubtedly, the underlying moral dilemma in this issue has been around forever. It’s called “theft”. Someone produces or owns something. You take it and use it without fairly compensating the producer. It’s theft.

Bring it home. You’re a lobster fisherman. You haul in a huge load of lobster, and someone comes along and helps themselves to it. It’s theft. Is it a defense to say, “well, he/she makes more than enough money fishing for lobster”? Or, “the price of lobster is too high anyway, so I’ll just take a few as a sample, and if I like them I’ll buy them next time”? No.

Finally, here’s one “reason” for music theft that I’ve heard: “The fat-cats at the record companies make deals with new artists and bands that make executives rich while the musicians get very little for their art. I’ll get even with those fat-cats by downloading, not buying, the music. That’ll show them what I think about them ”.

Let me get this right. You have a favorite band. The record label they sign with makes what you consider to be too high a percentage from every sale. So, to get back at the label, you steal the music, depriving the band of any compensation at all?

Doesn’t make much sense to me.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski