Watching the Big Question on BBC this morning, I felt prompted to put the following on the forum for the programme (slightly editted to correct some typos I spotted too late):
The music industry persists with the fallacy that copying music is theft. It is not.
Theft denies the owner of an item any access or use of that item. Copying something creates a separate new item without affecting the rights of the owner. It is not theft.
The music industry and artists also mistakenly equate a copy made to a 'lost sale'. This is not correct. Most copies are made by people with either only a passing interest or little money. If they did not copy the music they would live without it.
People copy music for choice. Music is available 'freely' as far as the end consumer is concerned via many routes - the radio, music TV channels, pubs/clubs (people do not percieve they are paying for the music), etc - but usually they don't have a choice in when or where to hear tracks they want to hear.
When you buy music, you are confered a limited right to listen to that track where and when you choose. Downloading music without paying for it is only about gaining that 'any time access' without rewarding the artist. It is not theft and most people for most tracks that they download would rather live without that access than pay for it.
Music has ALWAYS been copied - from minstrals traveling around and having their songs re-sung by others, to modern flawless reproduction. Artists can not stop people resinging their songs or even remembering the song in their own mind- all that is gained with a download is greater fidelity to a particular performance. Again, it is not theft.
Artists have historically made money from the scarcity of the copies of their works confering some value to those copies. This ceases to be a valid business model in the digital age and the sooner the music industry and artists wake up to that and leverage the market in otherways, the sooner we can stop wasting effort and money as a society on this pointless 'crime'.
Downloading music is not theft.
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Additional comment: I do however personally beleive it is immoral to not reward artists for thier works, for things I enjoy, and currently the only way to do that is to pay for music through traditional routes, but the sooner alternative business models exist to reward artists the better.
Germaine Greer made almost exactly the same points as I'd made in the programme but much more elloquently ;) she made the point that copyrite law exists to protect authors from publishers historically so publishers had to pay authors for each copy they produced. By extension, each individual making a copy of music could pay an artist directly - thus marking the end of the traditional publishing industries; which is of course why they are so vehamently defending the old dated business model- they cease to have the same significance in the digital world, just as newspapers are also struggling.
The cultural shift to recognize that things have changed will be even more important when we all have 3D printers in our homes and can download models to build physical things too. A lot of other industries (spare car parts etc) will also need to be re-considered.
