Carlion,
Loaning is totally okay, because when you loan somebody your CD/book, you yourself are giving up the use of it. You bought one use and you still have only one use. Giving a friend a photocopy is a problem, because then there are two uses floating around.
Either way, two “uses” have occurred, and the artist has been (according to some posters here) “robbed” of the profit. That you personally sacrificed time with your copy doesn’t make up for the money lost to the artist if someone uses your original copy for free.
Think about it–we loan people books and music all the time. Libraries do it. The same libraries warn on their photocopiers that you can’t be copying copyrighted stuff, but the borrowing is fine.
Right, and that’s what I’m pointing to when I say that these laws against file-sharing make no sense. The library is a good example of this. Thousands of people are allowed to show up individually and read a book for free and no one cares, but if they try to all read it at once, by way of copying it, they are all suddenly targets of the publishers wrath. It’s a ridiculous concept that has now spilled over into the world of music.
People keep claiming file-sharing is immoral behavior, but they can’t p(name removed by moderator)oint what exactly makes it wrong.
Again, quantity can’t be the issue. Stealing, for example is immoral, period; it doesn’t matter of you steal 1 dollar or a million. Theft is theft. Right? So then a person who lends one CD to a friend for a weekend is just as guilty as someone who spreads thousands of copies via the internet, because whether you’ve robbed the artist of one album sale or a thousand, either way you’ve committed theft. But no one’s going to arrest the weekend lender/borrower, because there is nothing intrinsically disordered with borrowing.
The problem comes in when the person distributing copies starts charging for them, like DVD bootleggers you see out in the streets sometime. Money is being made, but it’s going to the wrong people, i.e. unlicensed vendors. That’s why it would be wrong for a library to sell illicit copies of books, but not wrong for them to lend the books for free.
But that isn’t what’s happening with music sharing. People are sharing, for free, not pirating, which involves theft and resale. To label as pirates the people who freely share music is misleading at best, libelous at worst.
The other issue that the laws are supposed to be targeting is the idea of intellectual property, and who creative ideas originate with. If I claim that I wrote the latest hit song, when in fact I didn’t, I’m making a false claim of authorship, probably to profit by it, and I can be prosecuted for that. But again, that isn’t what’s going on here. No one who shares these songs is claiming they wrote them and then asking for money.
In the end, the laws are in place to prevent people from unlawfully profiting from work that they have no claim to. They are not in place to serve as a force for collecting money that otherwise would not be spent. That kind of thing is usually referred to as a protection racket.
And as to the people who keep recommending confession for this, because it’s against the law as the law currently stands, I have to ask them, do you confess all the times you went 60 in 55 mph zone? Because that’s against the law, too, and in fact, I would say that’s a worse offense, because increased speed has been shown to increase injury and casualties in car accidents, whereas file-sharing has never endangered someone’s life (so far as I know).
I apologize ahead of time if anything sounded snarky; that’s not the intention. Just healthy debate
