[cacophony]

i'm not disagreeing with you in general, just on the point that performance and merchandising isn't where artists get their income. i think the argument that it's not theft because the original owner retains the original copy is just a way to split hairs and absolve yourself of guilt. intellectual property theft is different from physical property theft. it's apples and oranges.

the problem is, the availability of free pirated creative works has turned us all into gollum: "we wants it, so we takes it." wanting a piece of music isn't justification for just outright taking it.

we can quibble about where to split the hair, is it when you look at the pretty painting, or when you take a pretty pictue of the pretty painting, or when you scan the pretty picture of the pretty painting.... it's all a bunch of self-soothing faux-intellectual crap. you know when you launch bittorrent whether you're planning on getting your grubby mitts on a piece of music that is commercially available for pay. period. if the intention of the artist was to make their artistic expression available in exchange for money, then you're stealing when you choose not to exchange money for it. end of story, it's no more complicated than that.

does that mean i'm squeaky clean? nope. i'm part of the problem, too. by and large i pay. i pay for 99.9% of what i have. but every now and then there's that single that was released as a b-side in 1992 and isn't available anywhere online or in stores or on ebay.... and what do you know, i have a copy of bittorrent installed right here on this machine.

but i'm not going to write oodles and oodles of paragraphs debating whether or not it's stealing. it's friggin' stealing. i don't care how hard it is to find or how badly you wanted it, it's still stealing.

call it what it is.