Dear Catholic Exchange:
I want to say that I do enjoy receiving your Words of Encouragement each morning. They do give me much food for thought and often help me to focus on what is truly important.
However, this morning, I was puzzled and disagreed with your thoughts about stealing music. I asked my son, Luke, who is more computer savvy than myself and this was his reply:
If this were in fact the rationale, it would be valid, but it isn't. It rests on a number of popular bad assumptions, chiefly, that one would otherwise buy the CD. The availability of mp3s has not changed my buying habits at all. It has changed one thing and that is, instead of listening to the radio in my room, with DJs that I largely dislike; I am listening to mp3s in my room. How is it theft to stop using one free media (the radio) in favor of a different free media (the mp3 files)?
Similarly, when I make a CD from mp3s, I have replaced the earlier method of recording songs off the radio onto blank cassette tapes. While it is easier to do it with mp3 files than it was with cassette tapes, the author below correctly identifies that it would be theft, if and only if, I were to start selling my home-made CDs.
I look forward to your response to his thoughts.
Thank you for helping to spread the Good News of Jesus!
In God's love,
Ann Schierer
Dear Ann and Luke:
Artists have agreements with radio stations. The music is broadcast with the artist's permission and is, of course, a form of advertising for the artist's work so that the artist will receive due payment for his labor in the form of purchases of his work. That arrangement is between the artist and the radio station. It does not follow from this arrangement that we have the right to take the fruit of the artist's labor, any more than it follows that, because they hand out little taste samples of sausage at the grocery store, we therefore have the right to walk off with all the sausage in the meat section. Similarly, the store owner would not be much consoled to know that the sausages we stole were not resold, but merely eaten by us when we got home. The simple fact would remain that we took his sausage without paying for it.
Now some artists have deliberately opted to make some of their work available via free downloads as a form of advertising akin to radio broadcasting, and I see no problem with taking them up on their offer just as there is no problem with tasting the sausage they offer at the grocery store. But where permission has not been granted, and we take that which we have not paid for, it's theft of intellectual property.
Mark Shea
Senior Content Editor
Catholic Exchange
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