This is thread has gone completely off topic, but of course you could take back the CD you stepped on the store would give you a new one as a common courtesy. They would do it because they want you to shop there so they will typically exchange something for any reason, even user error, for some type of warranty period. I feel an online store should be even more lenient since they incur no financial loss for replacing merchandise while a physical store does. Maybe criminal is too harsh a word, but I don’t want to give my business to someone who is going to act like an @#@# if I have problem and have the attitude of too bad so sad.
The flaw in your whole argument about the lost downloads is that you didn’t pay for a CD, you paid for a one-time download and these are two completely different formats. This is significant because it costs companies money every time you download your individually purchased mp3 because you are using up bandwidth that other potential customers could be using. You are also paying a premium in order to purchase music on a song-by-song basis instead of having to buy the entire CD like we used to. Also, mp3s can be copied and transferred to several different devices, so they are more expensive because they are virtual and it’s possible that you could own one indefinitely(unlike CDs which wear out with time). It’s not fair to hold an online music company to the same standard as a retail chain because there is an inherent risk to purchasing a one time download(PC crashes, deletion, etc.). If you wanted the reliability of a CD, you should have bought one.
Oh, and you obviously have never tried returning any form of disc media to a store before or you would know that they accept
NO RETURNS of any CD or DVD after the seal is broken. In other words, it
is the attitude of “too bad so sad”. It’s difficult to get retailers to return
any item nowadays without a receipt, much less something that you’ve clearly broken yourself.
As for the initial question about downloading the stolen songs, I really don’t think it’s morally right to do it. Just because you
once owned a piece of art, literature, or music doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to it the rest of your life. You initially purchased the songs on a disc, knowing full well that they could get damaged. Yes, you could have legally backed them up, but you didn’t and now they’re gone. You
owned them once, but now they are gone and if you want them back you should go out and replace them(there are many used CD shops out there with very reasonable prices).
CDs don’t last a lifetime, and the music industry expects you to buy new ones if yours get ruined, stolen, scratched, etc. The average person will probably buy the same CD at least two or three times in their lifetime. Heck, I’m on my second copy of at least 4 CDs now and I’m still young! If the music industry was selling you a lifelong ownership of the
music contained on the CD, and not the just the CD itself, the price you paid would have been much more expensive. You didn’t buy the music, you bought the CD that holds the music. No CD, no more music.
Music, art, and literature are all intellectual property and the creator retains rights to that property. If you go out and buy a book, do you have a lifelong ownership of the story contained in that book regardless of format? No, you own one copy of that book, and when the book is gone, you are expected to go buy a new one. If you have a fire and all the books you own are burned do you have the right to go online and illegally download ebooks of everything you owned? No! So why do we think this applies to music? Well, unlike printed intellectual property, music can be easily uploaded, downloaded, and burned to CDs.
It’s not difficult to understand why illegal downloading is morally wrong, it’s difficult to
accept that it’s wrong - because then you have to stop.
