So yes, more hubbub about piracy and the RIAA and the targeting of college students and lawsuits and money and etc, etc, etc. If you're like 99 percent of the college population, you trashed the e-mail from DoIT, maybe skimmed an article in the paper and haven't thought about any of this stuff for more than a couple of seconds.
The truth is, however, that the RIAA really has been busy lately: Thirteen different campuses have been singled out for lawsuits, including Arizona State University, Ohio University, the University of Southern California and the University of Texas. Each campus received somewhere between 20 and 50 threatening letters addressed to individual students. That's up to 350 U.S. college students who have been identified by the RIAA as illegal downloaders who owe remuneration—around $4,000 on average—for their sins.
UW-Madison has fought back against this—claiming that computers are so ubiquitous on campus that it's impossible to track down who actually physically committed the crimes (i.e. your roommate could have been using your computer, and a computer in a library is entirely up for grabs). The University of Nebraska has gone one step further and actually demanded the RIAA pay them for wasting their time with frivolous lawsuits. Most everyone I know is in favor of this response: Nobody likes when large, faceless agencies arbitrarily lash out at the generally helpless and destitute over a perceived slight.
And while I tend to cheer on UW, and Nebraska as well, I do want to take a minute to slow down, take three big steps back, and look at the question in the abstract: Is it, as a general rule, ethically okay to download music?
Before launching into any kind of thought-experimentation, I should admit from the get-go that I am just as guilty as anyone of occasionally downloading music. I'm not a fanatic about it, and I don't have hard drives full of illegally stored files, but some CDs I own definitely came from the net and cost me $0.00.
That being said, I don't see how I or anyone else can argue that, from a moral or ethical perspective, downloading is not synonymous with stealing. If I get a Radiohead album off of LimeWire or Azureus, and I burn it to CD and stick it in my CD rack and go on with the rest of my life ... well, that's $15 or so that Radiohead just lost from me. Not only Radiohead, but Radiohead's label and also the flesh-and-blood employees of B-Sides or Exclusive Co. On a Kantian level, if you were to take the universal maxim of downloading—i.e. everybody downloads and nobody buys CDs—the entire music industry would collapse overnight.
And yet I still have LimeWire on my computer. It's not going anywhere. Why? Well, partially because I use it to download completely random stuff—a Monkees single here, or that ""Don't know much about history"" song from the '50s that's so great. But even beyond that—sometimes I will download an entire album. I don't feel any pangs of guilt over this, either, despite the above paragraph. I'm not sure if this comes from the same kind of moral and legal apathy one gets from, say, jaywalking or if I simply ignore my own beliefs on the subject because it's in my self-interest to do so.
A few things I am in support of: I still spend a boatload of money on music. It's too hard not to. More often than not, the convenience of just buying an album and having it beats the hassle of downloading, organizing, burning, etc. Also, when I do download an artist, odds are good that if I like them I will at some point be inclined to spend money on them—be it through their next LP or the next time they come to the Orpheum or High Noon Saloon.
But I want to hear from you, reader: what's your opinion? Is it a moral taboo? Is the question even on your radar? If I get some good responses I'll do a follow-up column and maybe you can read your name in print!
