Mick: I was too hasty with "knee jerk reaction" and I do apologize. You make many good points in justifying your perspective. The morality of copy, or downloading, at either end of the spectrum is fairly clear.

It is wrong to copy something that you will use regularly from an original, or from the web, in order to avoid paying for it.

It is ok to make a duplicate for protection and backup, or to transfer to a new technology, for personal use.

What is being faught over is the grey area in the middle. The Music industry wants to set up standards and force technological solutions (at our expense) that limit ALL copying. They want a blanket share, or "royalties" to be paid to them, whether: an item is copywrited and the owners are known and royalties can be distributed; it is copywrited and the owners cannot be traced (in this case they keep the royalties; it is copywrighted and permission has been given to download or copy (i.e. free sample mp3s), or it is not copywrited. Their perspective is since there is no way to sift through border cases with any certainty let's just restrict everything.

My whole point before is that debate needs to occur and ALL interested parties should have a say in what is legal or illegal: moral or immoral.

I believe the borderlines are still being worked out, and in the grey areas it is not yet clear what is moral or immoral. In this respect I disagree with Mick.

Some specifics:

When I was researching a paper in grad school, I would go to the library and copy articles, or pages of articles, for my research. I still do this in my professional life. It is legal and has been judged "moral". What is the equivalent in the music industry? If I download 10 different versions of a folk song in order to compare renditions, copy lyrics, or discern chords, am I stealing? Some would say yes, others no.

When performances that are in the public domain are collected from old 78rpm records, gramophone disks, cylinders, etc., assembled and released on CD, who "owns" them? Clearly, the CD compilation is copywrighted, and I presume the particular audio footprints/versions of each song on the CD are also protected, especially if substantial work has been undertaken to clean up and remaster the recordings. However, no permission was obtained from the original owners, since the originals were already in the public domain. How much remastering must take place in order to assert ownership over the re-released material? What if no editing and remastering has taken place? Does the ownership encompass duplicates obtained from other originals? Probably not.

Simply because someone asserts ownership does it mean that ownership exists? When the Music and Publishing industries work to change the copywight laws and extend them to cover material that is already in the public domain copying may become illegal, but it doesn't mean I have to agree that it is immoral.

I try not to download material from current artists, or material that is readily available from other sources, especially if I'm going to listen to it alot. However, even by my own standards, I must admit that I probably have "stolen" some material. My only defense is that it falls into the area of petty larceny, and not grand theft. I do try to find available material that I can buy. I do download if it is not available or difficult to obtain. And yes I am a collector by nature and love getting something for free, even if I never have listened to some of the recordings (That's 2 Mick).

JAB

P.S. I do believe that we should support Camsco, Folk Legacy, and other labels that release the material we love including CDBABY. I have bought and will continue to buy CDs from them. I just believe we should support them based upon different premises. They strive to collect difficult to find material, they preserve what would otherwise be lost, and they provide the life blood and distribution system to artists that carry on the traditions of the past. They provide a much needed public service to our community and should be compensated and even rewarded for their efforts.