All this talking about illegal downloading, made me read and think about it. I understand the music industry wants you to feel guilty and to persuade you it is totally stealing and that you are the worst person on earth, depraving artists for doing it.
But let’s play the devil’s advocate for a little while, actually some of what I am gonna say is backed up by law professors.
First, if sharing files is stealing, was I a thief when some people sent me mp3s in an email attachment? or when a few years ago, someone burnt me a CD with a few songs? I know file sharing is done at a very large scale, but what’s the difference in the principle? Stealing a dollar or a million is still stealing. In this case we are all thieves, since there is probably not a single person with a computer who hasn’t done it.
Secondly, stealing may not be the appropriate term, as people who download illegally are technically not taking a physical item, thus it is not perceived the same way by this new generation. Think about it, I am sure that the majority of people downloading on the web would never enter a store and steal a physical CD. This is the proof it is not perceived the same way at all, and rightly so. According to Rutgers University Law Professor Stuart Green, illegal downloading is more similar to trespassing than stealing, since stealing means depriving the owner of the property. Even though the person who has illegally downloaded the music can distribute it to millions, the artist is not depraved from the property as he/she still has it. Of course it is a question of semantic, but it matters as stealing has a much stronger moral connotation than trespassing.
Thirdly, even though there is no physical depravation of propriety, people are going to argue that the artist is losing money since people download the music for free instead of paying $10 to download the music on Amazon or iTunes… Well, yes and no. It is quite difficult to estimate what part of the total activity this represents, but a lot of illegal downloading is done by people who would not have bought the music in the first place. Illegal downloading does not always represent lost sales, the industry has to face reality, as there is no way to know how much the industry is actually losing. In a few clicks I could download one hundred recent albums, but I am pretty sure I would not have bought the large majority of them, or even any of them.
Furthermore, If you give me the music of an unknown band, I am gonna to take it, if you offer me to pay a few dollars for it, I may pass since I have never heard of the band! Why do you think all these indie bands allow free mp3 to be posted all over the blogosphere? The argument is that these bands benefit of this publicity, and more people will go to their next gig. And this is true, free music is often a gain for the artist.
Lastly, the young generation doesn’t have the same idea of what is intellectual property with all that sampling going on in rap songs. For them it is a vague idea, and if something exists, they can take it! Just look at this beef between Don Henley and Frank Ocean, who had heavily sampled The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’, in his ‘Nostalgia, Ultra mixtape’… Henley threatened to sue Ocean if he performed the song again, whereas ironically Ocean had released the song for free. I don’t know but in this story, Henley looks a little like these big labels screaming after the thieves.
I am not encouraging illegal downloading with this article, but calling it ‘stealing’ will never be efficient, especially with this new generation. As I already said, illegal download is too easy, too under your nose to be stopped by some semantics. It is not my opinion, it is a general consensus, as there was for example an article in Forbes magazine two months ago entitled ‘You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You’ (although it was concerning the movie industry). There is even a user on Twitter called LeakTweet who is giving you the links of the latest releases to download for free, in plain view. But in general Google makes it extremely easy, so should Google be sued by the music industry? That's foolish!
Anyway, the industry is fighting a pointless war, in any cases, downloading will be soon a thing of the past with all these streaming services.