Piracy As Theft

CD sales plummeted 20% over the last year. Digital sales have increased, but nowhere near enough to offset the drop in CD sales. The record industry blames this on piracy. File-sharing advocates, on the other hand, have long blamed slumps in music sales on the poor quality of new releases, or on the expense of CDs, or on the restrictions put on digital downloads, or any number of similar stories.

None of these, however, are persuasive. First, note that these arguments are suspiciously self-serving; they attempt to justify the behavior of the people who espouse them. Second, notice that the structure of these arguments follows a pattern: they always blame the record industry, while never contesting the fact that file sharing is occurring. On the contrary, they tacitly concede that illicit downloading hurts the music industry. But this harm, they claim, is self-inflicted, or at least avoidable. It's the victim's record industry's fault.

Color me skeptical. People who download all of their music and never pay for any of it are not doing the record industry a favor. They are free riding off of the people who do pay for music, without whom the free riders' favorite downloads wouldn't exist. Studio time isn't free and neither is production, packaging, and marketing. Neither, for that matter, is food and housing for the people who make their living off of the production and sale of recorded music. These people depend on music sales for their livelihood; refusing to pay for recorded music harms them. Blithe disregard for these consequences is not virtuous. Downloaders who refuse to pay for music are acting selfishly, thoughtlessly, and unethically.

Of course, not all file sharers harm the record industry. I'm confident, for example, that file-sharing services have increased the amount of money I spend on music. I pay $30 every month for 100 downloads from eMusic and I buy at least a dozen CDs every year. All told, I spend at least $500 a year on recorded music, which is much more than I spent before BitTorrent. In my case, Internet piracy has filled the role of bootlegs and mix tapes; it has increased, rather than decreased, my interest and enthusiasm for music. I pay for music not because I couldn't get it for free, but because I appreciate and I want to support the people who produce it. Clearly, though, the numbers tell a different story about how widespread piracy affects behavior. It's a worrying trend for those of us who would like to see the industry healthy and profitable, and it's distressing to hear the self-serving defenses of people who, apparently, couldn't care less.