Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Mike Arrington ponders on whether stealing music is right or wrong.

Let’s put the law aside for a moment - this post is about doing the right thing. We’ve been hammered with messaging from the government and the music labels that downloading or listening to music on the Internet is stealing, unless you pay for it. We see the video clips before movies at the cinema saying its wrong. We read about lawsuits against twelve year olds for downloading music from BitTorrent. Our government is even willing to threaten other sovereign nations over music piracy.

But over the last few years the line has blurred to the point where there really isn’t any line any more. We can listen to free, on demand streaming music at MySpace Music and lots of other sites. It’s ok to do it at MySpace, but it’s wrong to do it at Project Playlist, just because the right contracts aren’t in place? Just a couple of years ago anyone listening to free streaming music anywhere on the Internet was violating copyright and subject to being labeled unethical. Today, its no problem. And you don’t even have to listen to audio ads.

But downloading music, that’s still wrong, right? Nope. If you live in China, you can download music legally from Google for free. No problem.

I think Mike is asking the wrong question but makes excellent points. Stealing of course is wrong, in most cases, unless you are doing it to save lives etc. But here is a more interesting question; is downloading music legal. The answer apparently is it depends. It depends where you download it from and which country you are in and what you use it for. No layman can be expected to understand this. The laws need to change and they need to be simple and easy to understand and enforce.