Minor ethical question

[kerowo]

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Still stealing. Because you didn't excercise your right to back up the albumn before you lost it doesn't give you the right to do so afterwards by downloading it from the web.

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I don't doubt that you're right in a legal sense. I'm wondering about this purely in ethical/moral terms.

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Not only is he wrong in a moral sense, he is also totally wrong in a legal sense, at least in the UK. I'm not sure what US laws say. When I buy a CD I am buying a licence to use the data on the CD, I am not paying for a piece of plastic that magically transforms into sound or a piece of software when put into my drive.

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If stealing is morally wrong then you can't really claim the moral high ground by downloading music without paying the folks with the distribution rights to that music.

The way I know this wouldn't fly in the states (and I don't live in the UK so I don't really care what the laws are over there) is because the music industry is full of greedy bastards who weren't taking tade-ins on 8-tracks when casettes came out or casettes when CDs came out. They would love to sell you another copy of the music you accidentally destroyed.

Bits are bits and short of bandwidth costs there is no marginal cost to give you unlimited access to your album, but under the current model no major lable is going to do this. Since there isn't much loss to the labels if do pirate the music instead of buying a legal copy the ethical stakes aren't very high, but unless you have permission to download it again it's getting something that doesn't belong to you for nothing, which is pretty close to stealing, and is rarely very ethical.

[borisp]

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Let's start from the premise that downloading music off the internet without paying for it is theft...You then download the album off the intrawebs. Is this still stealing?

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Yes, the real life stuff is unrelated. The physical storage or presentation of an idea is a different entity from the content of the idea.

To back up your own music is to take steps to recreate a physical item which you value. Doing this requires some amount of physical capital, as does storing the music, in any case. The fact that modern technology has enabled these two types of capital to coincide simply means that those in the business of selling physical CD's either need to innovate or give up.