This is not about money, as some will tell you. This whole Napster business is as close as you get to what’s right and what’s wrong. It is about “piracy,” or the taking of something that doesn’t belong to you. It is stealing. It is an action most people learn in early childhood from their parents not to do. The trading of copyrighted information – whether it is music, movies, photos, software, or whatever – is trafficking in stolen goods. It is wrong. It is criminal. Online and offline – it makes no difference. It is immoral.
The reason we have copyright law is very simple: to protect intellectual property and the ability of artists and intellectuals to make a living from their labor. This capability is important both for the artist and for society. If musicians can spend their entire lives honing and developing their art and then see some anonymous person in a dark room with a computer somewhere give it away free to millions of strangers, they will stop making music. They will do something else that will enable them to put food on the table for their families and a roof over their heads. We have these copyright laws for a reason, as the end of copyright law and the ability of artists to protect and profit from their works would mean chaos and a drastic reduction in our artistic output. Take a look at what happens when copyright is thrown out the window and nobody is able to control their intellectual property and make a living from it: during the French Revolution, for example, when the novice government naively abolished copyright in an attempt to set information free, artists and intellectuals stopped producing entirely and culture came to a screeching halt. Writers stop writing books. There were fewer newspapers and magazines and of lesser quality; the quality of public debate sputtered and suffered. (Not long afterwards they were guillotining each other in large numbers.) Today the output of movies and music without copyright would come to a grinding stop. This unhappy situation could occur today. It could mean the onslaught of a cultural Dark Age.
People will tell you peer-to-peer file sharing is a weapon aimed only at the big, bad recording companies and software firms, but it are the artists and our culture who have the most to lose. What is supposed to set the music business and the intellectual climate free could kill both. Some say artists and thinkers should create art and ideas and share them for free. You will not find artists or thinkers who say they want to sweat and slave to produce art or new ideas and then give them away for free – not any who will say so with a straight face, anyway. Musicians, writers, painters, and filmmakers want to make money off their work so they can continue to live and create more music, writing, paintings, and films. It really is very simple. If music pirates who use-abuse Napster had the best interests of musicians in mind they would ask permission before they distributed copyrighted music over the Internet. They never ask permission.
Artists, like anyone else, should be paid for their work. But ultimately this is not about money but control. It is about ownership of intellectual property. And with Napster and other similar peer-to-peer software, it is about theft. Trading copyrighted files over the Internet is bad for artists. It is bad for our culture. It is stealing. It is wrong.
Questions to keep in mind:
