Peer Downloading Ethics

[sodascouts]

This was something that was mentioned in a thread that was closed recently. Well, I see that the folks involved in that dispute have taken the personal stuff to the moderator thread, so maybe we can talk about the non-personal issue here, because it IS something I have thought about.

Magazines like Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Time, and many others have had stories on the ethics of places like Napster, AudioGalaxy, etc. The record companies certainly believe it's stealing, and I can see their point. If songs which they would otherwise derive profit from are downloaded from a peer sharing site, that's one bit of revenue that just went down the drain - that we've stolen.

With the unreleased/live stuff, however, I feel the line is a little more blurry. Bootlegs have never been "legal", have they, regardless of whether they're peer-shared or not. All the peer-sharing changes is that, instead of paying someone to get a pirated bootleg recording, you're getting it free. I see that as no harm, no foul. We get to pretend we were at the concert, the artist has lost no potential revenue, and no one is profiteering off of it.

Peer-sharing technology brings up a whole set of ethical questions that not only people on this board, but fans/musicians/music executives everywhere, have been struggling with. I've tried to find a justifiable position in the gray area but I understand that a lot of people won't agree with me.

I think this also ties into another thread about the problem with Tusk being recorded on tapes by people off of the radio instead of those people buying it. Were they stealing, too? What if I tool my friend's CD and then made a cassette tape of it instead of buying that CD? Ah! So many questions!

SO, I thought it would be interesting to hear others' views on this, and thought I might when the topic came up in the infamous "other thread." Unfortunately, the speedy degeneration of that thread took it far away from this topic. I hope that, instead of stirring up another hornet's nest, that this thread could bring it back to that....if anyone wants to talk about this besides me, that is! lol