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 COLUMN
Is downloading music stealing? Napster tests our notion of right and wrong There's an old joke about the farmer, a man of few words, who went off to church alone one Sunday because his wife was sick and couldn't leave the house. When he returned, the wife questioned him on the sermon.
Farmer: "Sin." Wife: "Well, what did he say about it?" Farmer: "He was against it." Stealing is a lot like that. Most people are against it. More important, most people will gladly and emphatically tell you that they don't steal. What they don't tell you is that their definition of what constitutes stealing may differ significantly from yours. I bring this all up because many people, mostly recording industry executives and performers, will tell you that they consider downloading copyrighted music from the Internet to be stealing, while a significant majority of Internet users who were surveyed feel otherwise. There is a delicious irony here in that the recording industry -- like the movie industry -- has a long, established history of making billions of dollars by cheating performers, writers, and others out of what is rightly theirs. But that sad fact aside, there is more at work here than a clash of interests, with each side trying to maximize its own benefit. When I discuss stealing in classes I teach, I like to pose two similar situations to my students. In the first scenario, imagine that your car -- with its warranty newly expired -- develops a problem with an onboard computer. Installing a new one, your only option, will cost you $1,000. But you need the car, so you agree. When the car is finished the service person says, "Well, you're lucky. The car is still under warranty, so this won't cost you anything." The question is whether you, knowing the warranty has actually expired, own up to the fact and fork over the $1,000. Most people -- about 99 percent -- say they wouldn't. Now imagine that you're at the same dealership, and, while you're there, an armored car comes to pick up a load of cash. When you leave the dealership, you notice a bundle of money lying on the ground where the armored car was parked. It's a neatly packaged pile of bills, totaling $1,000, with a label that says "Property of General Motors." The question now is whether you stuff the money in your pocket or take it back into the dealership and turn it in. Again, most people -- about 99 percent -- would return the money. What I want to know is, what is so different about these two cases that we come up with completely opposite answers? Although many people have tried various explanations, I haven't heard any that settle the question adequately for me. Some of the explanations lean heavily on the fact that the price of the computer doesn't represent the actual value -- although the same thing could be said about the money, which is, after all, only pieces of paper. Others bring up the fact that the armored car driver could get in trouble when the shortage comes to light. They ignore the fact that the service person could get in trouble if the mistake about the warranty were discovered. Some people, after thinking about it, change their minds about the first scenario while very few change their minds about the second. Changing your mind is a perfectly fine thing to do and one of the goals of studying ethics, but it doesn't explain the original difference in intuitions about what constitutes "stealing" in these two cases. You might even be able to attack my examples, but I can come up with many more in which we might have significant differences about whether a particular act is stealing, despite the fact we both think that stealing, as a concept, is ethically wrong. We find the same sort of ethical problem when we confront the situation with Napster or any other use of copyrighted material on the Internet -- or even in something as low-tech as photocopying and distributing protected material. Many people don't consider this stealing. Yet these same people wouldn't for a moment consider going into a store and taking a CD or a book without paying for it. I wish I had some good answers to explain this puzzle. The overly simplistic ones -- society is going to hell in a hand basket or we've somehow "lost our moral compass" -- don't really explain how otherwise reasonable and moral people can have such different intuitions about such an important matter. There has to be something much more complex at work here. If you think you have an answer, please share it with me. Check out our InfoWorld forums or write to me at ethics_matters@infoworld.com. Carlton Vogt is the senior editor in charge of InfoWorld's e-mail newsletters. He holds graduate degrees in philosophy and theology and has taught ethics at the college level. He also has an extensive background in technology journalism. Discuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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