I was at a party over the weekend with several friends but there were also several people that I had never met before. At a table next to the one I was sitting at, the conversation of music came up. They were discussing different music styles and one guy commented that he had never paid for any music. This guy is in his mid to late 30’s, and pretty well off. They live in a very nice home and drive very nice cars, and he has a pretty high paying job. He says that he checks out music CD’s regularly from the library and rips them to his computer and then returns them. Someone asked if he thought what he was doing was illegal, and he said, that since he was a taxpayer, that his taxes paid for the CD’s owned by the library, and he felt that he had a right to keep a copy for his own personal use.
His logic is awfully flawed, the argument is sophomoric, but I can’t exactly say that I find him doing something *that *objectionable.
Then again, I’m not a big fan of the current way IP is regulated.
Edit: I’m not going to answer the poll because none of the answer choices really synchs up with my thought.
In the context of some stranger at another table, I don’t care at all. It’s really not my business what someone else does.
In the abstract, I suppose I’d frown on it but would look the other way. Getting the CDs from a library is a real grey area, though I’d lean toward disapproving. I have dropped a friend because he would buy used software, rip it, then return the disc for a full refund, though.
If he’s not actually distributing the files to anyone online, I don’t think it’s as big a deal as it could be. Maybe there’s a way he can donate to the artist somehow?
I’m like An Arky, my feelings on filesharing are muddled.
Hell yes. I’ll tolerate online distribution, but he directly wasted the employee’s time dealing with inventory for absolutely no profit, and he did it repeatedly. It was a shitty habit.
Not at all. But I stopped pirating when I got out of college and could afford to pay for my entertainment, and I never put a blameless employee to trouble. It’s not the pirating I care about, it’s the dicking over of a wage worker.
His justification for being a cheapskate is just a twist on the one he used in college, but updated for “I’m a taxpayer”. Plus he volunteered that he, a guy who makes a lot of money, had never paid for any music, which makes him a twit. The Napster generation all growed up.
Of course it’s stealing. But there are degrees. It’s one thing to eat a grape off a stem and it’s another to back your car up to the loading dock and remove entire cases of fruit.
Sure in the simplest form both are theft, but they are not equal.
You have to have a sense of proportion in things like this.
It’s like me and pens. I am the world’s biggest pen thief. I got drawerfulls of them from everywhere I go. I honestly don’t remember stealing pens but I pick them up when I see them.
I also take extra packets of “fake sugar” from Starbucks to offset the cost of their $2.00 cup of coffee. And YES that’s stealing too.
I have a hard time calling it stealing, but I would certainly call it unethical. IMO, it’s no different from file sharing on the internet, but that’s not to say it’s something one should do. Personally, I buy a lot of CDs because most of the music I enjoy is from non-mainstream artists so I want to help support them. But I think things get a little hazy with music.
Consider some situations I’ve been in where I’ve downloaded music. If I listen to it and don’t really like it, I don’t feel compelled to buy the album, and though I may not delete it from my library, I’m not really making use of it either since it may come up in shuffle, but that’s about it. But then, there have been times where something I didn’t really care for before has come up on shuffle and it happened to hit me at the right moment and I start to like it, at which point I’d likely buy the album. So I don’t even necessarily see not deleting something I don’t intend to buy as necessarily unethical, though this latter concept is probably against the letter of the law. Of course, these days, I’ll generally just check out a track or two online, and if I like it, buy the album, if not, I don’t even download it, but that’s neither here nor there.
In short, I see what he’s doing as unethical because he clearly has no intention of reimbursing artists, even if he enjoys it, and I imagine he must enjoy at least SOME of the stuff he’s ripped or why would he keep doing it. Worse, his logic is just dumb. By his logic, because the library has also likely has some moves andpaid for some software licenses, he has the right to rip any movies they have or jack a copy of Windows. It belongs to “the public”, not to him.
As for how I’d respond, I generally wouldn’t. Most people seem to come out on “I like getting free music” or “I don’t like breaking the law”, and it pretty much never goes anyway, so it’s just not worth bringing up with a stranger, especially if it’s something he’s been doing for a long while, as it sounds like he has. Attempting to tell a stranger why their behavior is unethical pretty much can’t end well.
I don’t see much of a difference between the first to options. It’s theft, pure and simple (the artist is not getting any money for his copy of the music). And in that sense it’s no worse than file sharing, which is the same thing. They’re both theft and ethically wrong.
Not that I would go out of my way to confront someone I didn’t know sitting at another table.
It’s theft, pure and simple. I wonder whether any of the people in this thread who think it’s fine and dandy make their living from the sale of their own intellectual property. I doubt it.
Copyright is the right to copy. Whether money changes hands does not come into it. If Mr. Library Music Thief did not own the copyright to the music, then he broke the law.
I’d have a problem if he was hurting the library, which are small and puny and poor. But if he’s stealing from the shitty record companies? I don’t really give a damn