Originally posted by Axl_Rose
A painter has no right to charge people who glance at his work, or inadventantly see it without being prepared to pay.

This point is completely assenine.

If you've downloaded a song off of Kazaa or some other p2p client or from an FTP site, you haven't done anything even remotely inadvertantly. You actively searched for something and chose to download something you thought was probably it.


Back to the real world -- Artists do have the right to make you pay to go into a gallery and see their works, and they do have the right to make you pay to buy the painting, prints and/or reproductions of their original works if you want to take the work home with you. Downloading music illegally is like shoplifting the print.

If a band is fine with that, cool. More power to them. We all know the marketing potential that lies there.

However, you don't have the right to take away somebody else's right to choose what they share and what they do not. You can download for free as much of my old band's catalog as I can afford to host. The three of us are glad to see our music still get around. On the other hand, we respect that other musicians would want to restrict downloads to a few songs or not allow it all together. It's their right and you'll never see me support the subversion of somebody's else's rights.

I'm honestly somewhat disgusted to see downloading taken so casually on a site composed exclusively of musicians. We're talking about other people's art here, their heart and soul's work, something they've likely suffered emotionally and financially to put forth into recorded form for you to enjoy.

Too many of you look on this almost as if it was vigilante justice and try ot think of ways to rationalize and glorify it. But students of history and human nature realize that vigilante justice is not justice at all.

In a truely moral society, who can give you the right to decide for me what of my art I share and what I don't?

NOBODY.

[Edited by Raskolnikov on 02-26-2004 at 11:04 PM]