"The Ethic of the Download"

I must confess. The teenagers I teach have drawn me into their nefarious web. In furtherance of their elaborate scheme to undermine musical creativity and record industry profits, they showed me how to “share” music on the Internet. Now I sit here, on the verge of downloading music to my iBook. And you know what? I may just do it. In fact, I’m tapping my toes in anticipation.

How can this be? Music industry executives — serious men in suits I could never afford — call this behavior “piracy,” as if it involved swordplay and the hijacking of precious cargo. Even the usually unhoodwinkable Bill Maher intoned on HBO that, when it comes to music file-sharing, “stealing is stealing.” The ethical fate of an entire generation — not to mention capitalism — is said to hang in the balance.

What a load of hooey.

I’ve asked my students, “Do you feel you’re breaking the law when you download?” They say, “I guess it’s illegal, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.” And I understand them. These kids — who don’t shoplift and who regularly spend $17.99 for a new CD — actually remind of my father.

My dad, of course, never downloaded anything in his life. (He wouldn’t have known what to do with a White Stripes single if jumped onto his hard drive like a cyber-bunny. Sinatra was his man.) But my dad loved to read. His library, which is now mine, contains Freud and Churchill; Phillip Roth, Charles Dickens and Thomas Pynchon; Shakespeare, Whitman, Rilke and Seamus Heaney.

But Dad also read mass-quantities of fun “junk.” He plowed, two-a-day, through Mary Higgins Clark and John Grisham; he would read a James Patterson or a Tony Hillerman over an extended breakfast. And here’s the thing: he often did not purchase these books. He picked them up through a system of “sharing” among friends and neighbors. Each novel would be read eight or ten times, passed around in country club lobbies, doctor’s offices and friend’s kitchens. It didn’t take place over the Internet, and it didn’t create digital “copies,” but this “book sharing” allowed my dad to enjoy books — wholly to take their contents — without paying for them.

I believe that my dad and my downloading students were doing, essentially, the same thing. My father got the maximum use out of these books without paying a penny for them. After reading them, he would go on to “share” them with someone else. Often me. My dad would have laughed if someone suggested he could be sued for reading a borrowed book. He might well have mentioned the word “library.”

What, exactly, is the difference between my book-sharing father and my file-sharing students?

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says, Well, the music “pirate” does not merely “borrow” a recording from a friend. He “steals” it. By making a high quality copy, he comes to own the recording without paying for it. My father, on the other hand, merely borrowed the books.

This distinction is, from a practical point of view, absurd. If one of my students downloads Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River,” the MP3 may live on the kid’s hard drive but, in fact, it is about as permanent as a raindrop.

The files that kids are sharing on the Internet are the musical equivalent of John Grisham — highly profitable and highly polished but, essentially, throwaway junk. The music industry argues that downloading “In Da Club” by rapper 50 Cent is like walking out of Borders Books with an unpaid-for hardcover copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. But, the practical truth is, it’s a whole lot more like borrowing The Pelican Brief for a couple of weeks.

Decades ago, my friends and I all taped music off the radio with our shoe-box-sized cassette machines then later created “mix tapes” to bring to parties or give to potential girlfriends, just like the main character in the book/movie High Fidelity. The songs we rearranged on tape and “traded” with our friends were coming out of car stereos on the avenue and restaurant speakers and shopping mall sound systems. “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!” Our low-fi copies and mix-tapes merely gave these public creatures another wall to bounce off of, another chamber in which to echo. If putting “Norwegian Wood” on a mix tape for your girlfriend was piracy, then we never heard John Lennon whine about it.

Today’s file-sharing teens are no different — the technology they use just works better.

Of course, the record companies aren’t really upset about people hearing Beatles’ songs without paying up — they’ve already made money on that music. When the RIAA recently filed a $90,000 lawsuit against 12 year-old Briana LaHara for file-sharing, they were protecting their interest in churning huge profits from selling disposable pop music to kids — not keeping Briana from “stealing” Mahler’s First Symphony for her permanent collection.

Ultimately, the record companies bullied Briana’s mom into a $2,000 settlement. Poor Briana said, “I am sorry for what I have done. I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love.” And I can’t help but wonder if the RIAA was planning to have Justin Timberlake testify to how Brianna’s download forced him to buy only one Hummer this year.

Here’s what I wish Briana could have said. “I will pay the $2,000 settlement to the RIAA executive who has never read a borrowed book and did not tape music off the radio or make a mix-tape when he was a kid.”

In the end, of course, the ethics of downloading will not matter. The RIAA can file lawsuits from now until the day Michael Jackson seems normal, but it is unlikely to bully an entire generation of Brianas into ignoring their common sense understanding that downloading an MP3 is neither the end of the world nor the downfall of Sony Music.

Still — getting something for nothing doesn’t seem right, so I’ve decided to stay away from file sharing. I tell my students to do the same. But if you’re a record company executive and you sometimes borrow books from friends, then we all want to know — what’s YOUR rationale for not paying?