Did you hear a song at a party this weekend that you need to have on your playlist? Can’t wait to get your hands on this week’s Daft Punk remix?
Chances are that you won’t be picking away the ridiculous protective tape around a new CD. You might shell out 99 cents to iTunes, but you will probably log onto Limewire or a bit torrent group and download the song for free.
You will most likely break the law, and unless you get caught you won’t really care. Stealing music is unquestionably stealing. Yet, for some reason it falls in an ambiguous middle ground. It’s a moral, but not a legal, gray area.
Every one of us has songs on our computer that we did not pay for. Remember the Third Eye Blind tracks you got off Napster in 7th grade? Did you throw those files away? What about the Kanye album you downloaded from Limewire last week?
Before record companies offered online, one-click purchasing, downloading seemed more ethical. When the music industry refused to give us music the way we wanted it – MP3s available in our bedrooms – it felt like we had the right to take what was offered, authorized or not. But the industry slowly evolved, and with the development of lawful downloading options, illegal downloading has become less justifiable.
The seductive appeal of illegal music is that with a query and a click the songs are yours, instantly and for free. But, beyond jaywalking, can convenience justify wrongdoing?
Isn’t downloading just making a copy of a digital file, a bunch of zeros and ones? In our increasingly virtual world, it is challenging to appreciate that the invisible digital files that contain movies, music, software and documents have real material value. Music sales, including lawful downloads, are plummeting. We, as the online generation, have not stopped listening to music, we have just stopped paying for it.
Beyond violating a written code, true crimes are supposed to be socially unacceptable. How can something that everyone does and most condone be truly illegal? Do you think of yourself, or your downloading friends, as criminals?
Like an increasing number of my peers, I don’t use Limewire or other illegal sources to get my music (you hear that, RIAA?) Yes, I can ignorantly claim innocence because I buy a marginal amount of songs from iTunes. But I mostly get music from my friends over personal networks. And who knows how they procured them?
Our guiltless propensity to steal music challenges the boundaries of right and wrong. Students have not stopped downloading illegally because of the ethical dilemma, they are stopping out of fear – especially in the wake of lawsuits filed against 16 students by the RIAA. It’s unfortunate that it takes real consequences, or the fear of it, to change students’ behavior. What happened to right and wrong?
Weinberg junior Maxwell Hayman can be reached at [email protected].
