In a world full of reasonable and sensible arguments for file-sharing services like KaZaa, Shawn Redden has managed to avoid all of them. His points run the range from oversimplified rhetorical polemic to attacks on the recording industry itself, but they all somehow evade the basic point of Mary Bruce’s article: file-sharing of the type discussed in her piece involves taking something that you normally need to pay for, and not paying for it. This is functionally no different from swiping a candy bar from a local Schnucks. You can argue that Schnucks won’t really miss a fifty-cent candy bar; you can argue that it deserved it for being an evil transnational corporate villain; but you can’t really argue that the act doesn’t constitute simple theft.
Redden may be entirely correct when he says that KaZaa is “a serious threat” to the music industry. Yet while that fact may indeed have spurred the industry to react, it has no bearing on the simple legality of their actions. Taking a musician’s music, which is normally for sale, and not paying for it without the approval of the musician and anyone else who owns it, is theft. The musician signed a contract. Maybe not a very good one, but a contract. And to claim that you are somehow benefiting them by stealing their music is the height of hubris. It’s bad enough to steal, but it is self-righteousness of the most obnoxious sort to then turn around and tell the victims that it’s for their own good. There is not a law in this country or anywhere else that confers upon Redden the right to listen to any music he wants at any time for free.
No “super-powered media cartel” programmed half the country to like Britney Spears. The reason that radio stations played her music incessantly is because pop is-brace yourself-popular. The reason that you don’t get to hear the indie rock or jazz or classical that you favor nearly as often is because it is less popular. Not because the “culture industry” hates you, but because people tend to pay more for ads on stations that have the most listeners. And if you in fact want to listen to those other albums instead, then go out and buy them; actually paying the artists for their work will probably allow them to produce more of it.
One of record labels is to produce a product that maximizes profit for their shareholders. But they don’t do this by making albums that lots of people hate, or those that most people aren’t willing to pay for. Thus, the ultimate goal is to make music that a lot of people like, not the opposite-even if their choices disagree with Redden’s personal opinions. Sadly, therefore, lots of music that fills an ultra-small niche in the musical world doesn’t get a lot of support. However, this hardly proves that niche music is “great.” There’s a lot of “great” music that I hate and wouldn’t listen to even if it were free. I never appointed Redden as the arbiter of my cultural taste; if he wants to listen to his music, he should pay for it himself instead of forcing me to listen.
Finally, what about people who illegally burn CDs, or those who make dub tapes, or record movies at home? It’s not because those acti-ons are in any way legal that nothing is done about them, but because they’re extremely hard to detect or track. Pirate movie rings get broken up all the time, but obviously isolated incidents are impractical to prosecute; if you handed the police a list of pirates and their addresses tomorrow, though, the story might be different. To claim that somehow KaZaa users are being discriminated against is absurd, as is the argument that because other people get away with crimes, you should be allowed to as well. The magnitude of the crime is different, but not the fact that in both instances a crime has been committed, like it or not.
“Crime” and “illegality” are not relative terms. They have very specific, proscribed meanings which no amount of overheated rhetoric is going to change. Downloading music isn’t protected by the first amendment, and hiding behind the First Amendment as a self-serving attempt to hurt the recording industry both cheapens the Bill of Rights and insults our intelligence.