@Alan:
First, I repeat, my aim here is not to defend piracy but to say that it's not the same thing as theft. Most piracy is bad, and most theft is bad. They're just not the same things. Occasionally both piracy and theft are justified.
“It's true that home taping didn't kill music, but pirate downloading has crashed the income of many recording artists. I have friends in the music business, touring musicians with well-known artists, who have had to take fairly deep salary cuts and loss of other benefits over the years because the artist's royalties from recording sales plummetted with the original Napster, and have only gone down since then.”
I'm sorry to hear that these artists' lives underwent such a difficult change, but with or without piracy, this sort of change was bound to happen. Similar changes occurred with the invention of moveable type, which completely undermined the lives of monks who worked in the scriptorium; and the establishment of public libraries, which completely changed the way authors make money.
Many studio musicians had many “good years” after studio technology advanced to multi-tracking, but before the general public had access to decent taping equipment. Many made colossal amounts of money without doing much “treading the boards” of public performance — something musicians have been expected to do, almost throughout history. The tide was in their favor then, but it has turned against them now — and that's the way the ebb and flow of history works, with or without piracy.
“This isn't because the artists in question aren't popular (they still sell out concerts across the world), it's because for every album they sell, four or five copies are downloaded “free” or are “shared.” Nobody can take an 80% loss of income and carry on as if nothing's changed.”
Exactly — but the whole world is changing, and there are bound to be winners and losers, with or without piracy. The nearly-universal availability of cheap computers and the internet is a much bigger deal even than the invention of moveable type. Musicians, writers, academics, almost everyone — it's all completely different for them all. Including me.
“Piracy issues are easy enough to justify when they're cast in philosophic, abstract terms. But there are always real people involved, and real consequences.”
I'm 100% in favor of thinking in terms of real people, real consequences — and real circumstances. I wouldn't dream of defending commercial profit-making piracy, but an impoverished learner geek is something quite different. Even a teenage learner guitar-player using Napster is probably adding to rather than subtracting from the wealth of human creativity, in my opinion, although someone much wealthier than the teenager loses.
Years ago I used to play in (very) minor band. We used to lend our practice amps to another, slightly younger band called U2. We played live performances, but never made a record, mostly because I left when I got interested in philosophy. It seems to me that those very modest live performances all those years ago are a proper calling for anyone who calls himself a musician. Real musicians can still make a living out of that, although it may be a less opulent living than what they grew used to when “the studio” was something they had, but the consumer didn't have.
