There was a recent Los Angeles Times article that dealt with copyright infringments in music. As a musician, I am always ambivalent on this issue because on one hand, hopefully musicians are in the business because they want to make music and want people to hear their music, but on the other hand it is their livelihood and we don’t tolerate people walking into retail stores and stealing anything, so why would we tolerate the same act digitally?
Anywho, the article finds a growing trend, that younger individuals are seemingly growing more morally convicted about the illegal downloading and distributing of digital music and movies. This brings me to my favorite part of the article. They quote a professor at NYU when he said
At my wedding I handed out about 150 mix-CDs … I was freeloading on songs by Louis Armstrong and others, but I think that’s why they became musicians in the first place. Music has worth because it lets us communicate in ways we can’t manage on our own. But to communicate, we have to be able to share.
If I was a student at NYU, you better believe I would be in his class. How could this man object to plagarism? Knowledge is gained by sharing, so we might as well allow all shared knowledge on term papers and tests.
