Territorial Restrictions

[tvdxer]

Thanks to the infinite wisdom of recording companies, certain electronic content is available for download solely in a limited region. For example, try downloading a song from amazon.fr or the French iTunes store in the U.S: you can’t, even if it the song is not available for download in the States. In many cases, stores like Amazon.fr or Amazon.de will sell you the physical version of the song (CD), but this presents several obstacles to the consumer: 1) Often, you have to buy the entire album and 2) Shipping goods from Europe (or wherever) to the U.S. are prohibitive and take a long time.

Now, I’d be perfectly willing to pay the $1.00 or $1.39 to download the song. But I can’t, because of “territorial restrictions”! Record companies unwittingly encourage piracy by restricting their songs to certain outlets available only in certain countries. What’s a Catholic to do? When I have run into this situation in the past, I have downloaded the music video from Youtube, isolated the audio track and copied it to a separate file, and burnt it to a CD, but I’ve had questions of conscience about this lately. Is this a venial sin, or no sin at all when record companies or their artists do not make songs available for download in your country?

 

[Whitacre_Girl]

I am just going to watch this thread to see if anyone has suggestions for getting music from foreign countries without buying the whole CD. I can’t download what I want to on iTunes or Amazon, and I’m not going to spend almost a $100 to get a CD from europe or Asia to here.

 

[baltobetsy]

What’s a Catholic to do? Order your priorities in such a way that having a song or not is less important to you than this. Cultivate the virtue of detachment.

 

[tvdxer]

What’s a Catholic to do? Order your priorities in such a way that having a song or not is less important to you than this. Cultivate the virtue of detachment.

You know, I only started ripping YouTube videos about a month ago, and have around just five songs. I never really ripped YouTube videos before that (with the exception of one song) because of the fear of committing the sin of a sort of theft. I later reasoned that the artists of the songs probably would either not be offended or even encourage my “ripping” (note that I rip audio from YouTube videos rather than download the song, although that probably wouldn’t change it). Musicians generally want their music heard and played; they expect compensation if possible, but in these cases the compensation would either be impossible or very inconvenient. I also reasoned that by not making the downloads available on either the U.S. iTunes store or the Amazon.com MP3 store, or anywhere I’ve found in the U.S., the record company and “digital content provider” are not interested in making sales to the U.S. On the other hand, they would have nothing against having their music played in the U.S. However, this was on a very uncertain basis and I never really had moral certainty about the issue. Having struggled with scrupulosity in the past, I decided to intentionally choose the less “safe” option, as this is what those with scrupulous consciences are often suggested to do.

In addition, I think both a review of moral and legal norms are in order. The “social internet” (Web 2.0) has changed the world vastly in a very short time. A perfect example: In the earlier years of YouTube (2005-2007), people would often upload videos - of vacations, of deceased love ones, of “vlog” entries, etc. - with copyrighted background music, sometimes full songs. They probably weren’t aware of the fact that you needed to pay royalties to the copyright holder (usually a record company). They were technically infringing.

However, traditionally only institutional and professional producers were involved in paying royalties and obtaining performance rights. This was because there were virtually no mass distribution mediums available to amateur producers. This changed overnight with the launch of Youtube. Initially, the recording companies were keen to block the “infringing” soundtracks or file take-down order under the DMCA; but they soon realized that commenters often asked “What’s that song?” and they could actually make more money by granting Youtube a blanket license, applicable to all their videos, than by requiring individual, usually amatuerish uploaders to pay minuscule royalties - which, in 99.9% of cases, they wouldn’t anyway. This is a good example of how IP laws and practices are changing and going to have to change as a result of new distribution mediums not at all envisioned even 10 years ago. This time the audience, the consumers - the lawbreakers - are the impetus behind the change, not the producers or owners of the content.