The LA Times ran an interesting article earlier this week about music piracy and the Christian music industry. I remember back when Napster was actually cool, I pondered the morality of sharing music. It’s art, it helps sell recorded media, it’s free publicity for the musicians, it’s generally positive. And yet it flies in the face of all established ways of selling music, and against all the human laws that have been constructed to support that industry.
The current epidemic of RIAA lawsuits has made music file sharing more of a legal issue, but the debate about its morality hasn’t gotten any easier, especially for Christian folks, for whom morality is a central part of life. It’s obvious that the RIAA’s practice of suing single mothers for hundreds of thousands of dollars for copyright infringement is a little overboard. At its worst, an illegal downloader should be penalized about the same ammount as a speeding ticket; just enough to discourage them from doing it, but not enough to send them into indentured servitude for the rest of their natural lives. But legal matters are only temporary.
The true and lasting question about sharing music is the moral one. Is the music industry in fact rejecting something that is right and good? After all, didn’t your parents tell you that it was nice to share? Or is distributing art without charge or restriction actually wrong (and thus sinful) if the instutution that marketed and published that art says they don’t want you to?
Those attitudes, along with the arrival of an edgy and restless new generation of artists and lean times in the music industry, have created a clash between familiar imperatives: Spread the Word and Thou shalt not steal. (LA Times)
I’m actually sympathetic to both sides. But I do see the music industry, especiallly the commercial Christian music industry, woefully resistant to creativity. They have their business models, and they’ve worked since the 1950’s. But part of being an artist is being responsive to your medium. If the landscape of the music industry changes, it’s more productive to take that change and mold it into something better.
It may be a hard concept for the Christian music industry at large, which seems preoccupied with copying popular music, to understand. That resistance, and an appeal by Christian music trade groups to the command “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” contradicts the moral inclination of Christians, and most moral people of the world, to share things with one another freely. And appealing to morality in one sense, while contradicting it in another, simply confuses people who want to do the right thing.
Read More… via (MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium)
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