CommisarlestatYou have taken something with permission, this is similar to a gift, they have sold it too you for £0.
The problem with that is that, legally at least, the person who gave you permission to download it doesn't own what they're giving you. It is owned by whoever owns the copywrite to that piece of data (be it music, video etc.)
Maybe you can't touch data, and maybe it can be easily reproduced, but that doesn't change the fact that someone legally owns that data. It's called copywrite because it implies ownership of any reproduction of that media. Since downloading something is a form of reproduction, by doing it you are creating a copy of a product someone else owns the rights to. Therefore, you are stealing from whoever owns the rights.
Commisarlestat said:
When this is the case you cannot be stealing from the band.
Maybe not, but you're still stealing from the record company. Surprisingly, record companies are staffed by human beings, not all of whom are fantastically wealthy. That's what a corporation is, it's a group of people pooling their resources and labour and sharing the profits amongst themselves. If the corporation as a whole suffers, for example, because everyone gets their product for free instead of buying it, the individual employees and shareholders of that corporation are going to suffer, probably through being laid off as the company is forced to downsize, or seeing a reduced share performance due to dwindling profits.
There is no such thing as a victimless crime.. Stealing from a 'faceless' corporation merely means you're spreading the loss amongst a number of people. But then, how many people are downloading media instead of buying it?
Commisarlestat said:
Firstly the artists need to ask for a bigger cut.
Surprisingly, record companies are generally necessary to produce music.. Not everyone can afford to run a professional recording studio in their garage. Maybe in the future we will see a world without record companies, where only the fabulously rich have a chance of ever being able to market their music because noone else will have the resources to record, distribute and market music effectively. Personally, I prefer the world in which music is well produced and a decent range of artists get signed.
Commisarlestat said:
The companies profits are not linked hugely to theft, each company will expect a certain level of loss due to theft.
True.. but then, imagine if noone stole. The company profits would increase by the ammount they expected to tollerate in theft, that money would be reinvested into the business in the form of growth. The money would be spread to shareholders and employees, who would spend it on services, in turn encouraging growth in other sectors too, making other people richer, who pass it back into their business, and so forth.
One company's profits may not seem terribly important, but it has an effect in the overall state of the economy. The economy affects everyone, from the poorest up.
The same is true in music.. Record producers spend money. If their business is doing well because people are buying CDs instead of pirating, they have more money to spend and make other people richer. The money you save by pirating music would have gone somewhere else, and may well have facilitated someone else's livelihood. It's irresponsible to assume that theft or piracy have no effect on anyone. Any change in the way people spend money has an effect somewhere, and not just in some abstract world of economic theory, but on real people in the real world.
I should note that I download music for free myself, as I have trouble finding CDs or paid downloads of bands I like, and I resent paying postal costs for CDs unless I'm buying them cheap and second hand. However, I just think it's naive to assume that it has no effect. You can decide, as I have, that the effect is not important to you, but it's still there.