This is a tricky moral area. Is copying a piece of
music, theft, and therefore, unGodly?
It may not help us unduly to broker in the fact that
many artists put a stop to this downloading from Youtube - but then, the moral
position perhaps equates to the same principle as someone having or not having a
burglar alarm on their house. Think about that!
On the other hand, if a neighbour has a beautiful
garden to which you have contributed nothing - are you stealing by admiring all
that beauty? - No, because you are taking nothing away from that
neighbour.
No. My position on this - and do feel free to
criticise my logic - is that anything which costs the artist by my
actions is wrong. (We must also remember that many sites invite this as they have advertising attached.)
I have thought about this both long and hard and my
practices are to pay for all music that I would have bought
anyway.
In fact, what this means is that I pay for the stuff I
really like. I do not for the things I stumble across which I would
not have bought because I only quite like
them.
Convoluted thinking? - Indeed, it is. But that is what
works for me and leaves my conscience clear.
In fact, only a few days ago, a CD
which I could easily have downloaded for precisely
nothing, arrived from Amazon from where I had purchased it for the very
reasons listed above.
