Let's get real. Albums are expensive to produce. Oh, you can sit down in your bedroom with a cheap mic and a free copy of Audacity, burn it to CD-R and stick a label on it. However to do it properly you need a professional recording studio, professional engineers, professional production and packaging, and professional distribution. All this costs money. Even a low-key folk album will cost several thousand.

Some bands may be able to afford to give away music in order to attract punters to big concerts, selling thousands of tickets at £50 or more a seat. That's not an option for most folk performers. Of course, an album is a promotional tool, but it's also an expense which must be recouped. If you want to continue to benefit from well-produced albums, you have to be prepared to pay for them.

Music copying has gone on for decades, and we've probably all done it. However I suspect that most people have a conscious or unconscious budget for what they are prepared to spend on buying albums, and copies are in addition to this. One-to-one copies for friends are probably those albums which the person wouldn't buy, and they do help to spread awareness and possibly lead to future sales. That still doesn't make it right, but it reduces the negative effects.

That all changed with the coming of the internet and music downloading sites. Suddenly people could download an entire record collection for nothing. Putting an album on-line makes it available to the whole world. The impact is completely different, and cannot be compared with making individual copies. Spreading awareness isn't much help if it just means more people downloading the music for free. Most artists have their own websites and Myspace pages where you can sample their music before buying - there's no need to steal whole albums in order to check out a new performer.

There can be no justification for uploading current albums, or those where a re-release can be expected. There may be some justification for making deleted albums available, but even this isn't clear-cut, as we have seen from some of the responses to this thread.

The fact that some people choose to perform for free, or to make free software or music available, is immaterial. That's their choice. You have no right to make the choice for them, and no amount of posturing or self-justification can alter that.