Legalize It! (Downloading Music for Free, That Is)

A prominent issue today is the question of the morality of illegal downloading of music and movies. While some people use a subscription service to get music (such as Napster or Rhapsody), there is a large number of people who still share music for free. This pastime used to be more popular, but after groups like the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) started cracking down, many people became too intimidated to share their music. People of all ages, sexes, and backgrounds were sued and threatened by the RIAA. Many groups of people have voiced their disapproval about this. One group even compared downloading music to checking books out of a library, claiming that if it is illegal to download the music for free, then should it not be illegal to get books out of the library for free?

Improv Troupe "Improv Everywhere" (improveverywhere.com) staged a protest in front of a New York library. They pretended to be authors, and claimed that they wanted royalties for all of the times that their books were rented from the library. Though it was a mock protest, many people that saw their demonstration agreed with them. The actors that participated in the improv brought up the point that when a library buys a book, the author gets a very small portion of the money. The book is then read over and over by different people, for free. If a library patron has to pay a fine, the fine goes to the library-not the author of the book.
Some people may say that this is a different situation. When I brought this up with a friend, he mentioned that it is different because a CD can be copied over and over, thus creating more of the same file to be distributed. However, one can simply take a book to a copy machine and copy pages-in fact, most college libraries have copiers on every floor just for this purpose. Another point that my friend brought up is that when someone enjoys a book from the library, he or she will likely buy a copy of it for him or herself. This is not always the case (I am living proof of this), but there are many people who download music just to see if they like a certain CD. If they enjoy it, then they buy the CD so that they can support the artist.

While I understand that music is now mostly a "digital" format and thus easier to share than a book (made of paper, with many pages), it must be realized that it is about as absurd to say that libraries should be illegal, to say that all non-subscription music downloading should be outlawed. The "authors" in the Improv Everywhere experiment were tired of their "intellectual property being 'loaned' out for free." If the library pays for the book (or it gets donated), and then one hundred people read the book, how is it different from a person buying a CD, uploading it, and having one hundred people listen to it? What is stopping a person from getting a book out of the library over and over, or making copies of it?

Even scarier-if this is how a large group like the RIAA feels, what if another organization does feel that authors need some sort of extra royalties for each time their book gets checked out of a library? Is it possible that one day, it will no longer be free to check books out of a library; that we will need some sort of monthly subscription service in order to get anything out? Suing people for downloading music for their personal use is ridiculous, and we can only hope that the bullying from these groups stops before they have complete control over everything that we do.