Music Downloads: An unfinished philosophical essay

This essay has been inspired by the following story:
( more here: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3033364.ece )

“A Minnesota jury has ordered a woman to pay $222,000 (£109,000) for sharing music over the internet, in what has been hailed as a landmark ruling.
Jammie Thomas, a native-American who works on an Indian reservation, was ordered to pay the six record companies suing her $9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. The sum is equivalent to about five times her annual salary and is expected to force her into bankruptcy.”

This essay will concern itself not with the legal technicalities of the case, it shall be assumed that Thomas did indeed violate the letter of Minnesotan law. Rather, it shall examine whether it is possible to construct a rationally sound defence of such practises and thus whether laws ought to be changed to reflect this.


I shall begin by dismissing an argument which is often raised, but which I believe lacks sufficient merit to warrant further investigation.

Firstly, there is the argument that the price of C.D.s are unreasonable and thus record companies have only themselves to blame. This argument I think is relatively easy to eliminate without much discussion. No matter what the price of music, it cannot be said that we have a right to own music which we do not produce. As with any luxury product, simply not being able to afford it (or believing the price to be unreasonable) does not justify stealing it. If I can’t afford that Ferrari I’m not justified in stealing it, I have to buy a cheaper car. If I can’t afford a car, then I have to use public transport or walk. Yes it may be the case that music costs too much (though this has recently become highly debatable given online music stores offering songs at much reduced prices and established bands like Radiohead offering their albums for whatever their fans are willing to pay) but we are not justified in stealing something, just because it is overpriced.

It occurs to me however, that the analogy of buying a car may be slightly flawed.
There is perhaps a difference in what is happening when I download music illegally and when I steal a car.
Downloading a song creates a copy of the original so to speak, and gives me possession of this copy.
This is in marked contrast to stealing a car, which adds to my possessions, but deprives the rightful owner of the use of his car.

If we see theft as wrong exclusively because of the element of depravation, then it cannot be argued that the song’s original owner is being deprived of the song since it never leaves his possession.

It could of course be argued that what the owner is being deprived of is the money which he would have received in selling his own copies of his work.

At this point I think, a divergence occurs. If I would buy a piece of music, but I choose instead to download it, in order to save money, then I am still depriving the music’s owner of the money I would have spent on the piece of music.

However, we can imagine cases where this is not so. Perhaps I had no intention of buying an album, I merely like one of the songs and I am not (nor would I ever be) willing to pay the price of a full album just to get to listen to the one song I like. Perhaps I do not care for the majority of music enough to ever spend money on it.
If I would not have bought the music anyway, then I cannot be said to have deprived the artist of anything.

Thus perhaps we can justify illegally downloading music on the basis that as long as we buy what we would have bought regardless, no deprivation is occurring (perhaps it might be argued that we are in fact adding to the artist’s revenue if a download makes us want to buy an album we otherwise would have ignored.