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5000 years ago, some guy stood on a hill near a village and sang some songs. Many people from the village came to listen and they enjoyed his songs very much. They liked them so much, in fact, that several villagers began singing the songs themselves.

"Whoa! Wait just a minute!" cried the singer. These are my songs! Only I can sing them!

So, the villagers stopped singing.

Had this "moral" precident having established, we today would have no "Blue Tail Fly," no "Greensleeves," no "Barbra Ellen," etc.

I admit that music file copying may be illegal, and in some cases may be immoral (e.g., copying the entire latest Madonna CD, when you can easily buy it at a local store). But I do not believe that file copying is immoral in every case.

I recently downloaded a copy of Disney's "Song of the South," which that company has effectively embargoed for many years. I believe I have the moral right to do this, since there is no other practical way that I can view or enjoy this piece of art. For the same reason I also recently downloaded a rock song from the 60's that is totally out of print.

There is also a moral question as to whether the downloading of one song from a CD is actually "fair use," since you are only taking a portion of the entire work.

Let me emphasize again that I'm speaking about morality, not legality.

There is also a moral question as to whether the downloading of one song from a CD is actually "fair use," since you are only taking a portion of the entire work.

That depends to what use the music is put.

BTW, one thing I remember thinking ages ago that record companies should have done (probably too late now) would be to provide a means by which people could show that they purchased particular music, but not make such tagging mandatory nor have it degrade audio quality as "watermarking" approaches do. Players would not require such marks to play the media, but would validate and display them if they exist.

The fact is that many consumers like to have their stuff marked as theirs. Press a button on my player and, if I've bought the disk, it shows the ID of the publisher and my name. Of course, the RIAA would hate having such a system be voluntary, but being voluntary is the only way such a system would be willingly adopted.

Exactly as you stated in your post. Illegal? Maybe? Immoral? Who knows. We all break, knowingly and unknowingly, many (stupid) laws during a week.

I recently downloaded a copy of Disney's "Song of the South," which that company has effectively embargoed for many years.

Wait a minute! Song of the South may be, for all we know, in public domain, or it may go in public domain tomorrow, which means it is already in public domain in some time zone. 100, 1000 (or whatever) pages of dense lawyerspeak of the copyright law, 1000 of pages of legal opinions (and that's no exaggeration) and they tell us, summarize it as just plain stealing? Why don't they write the law to say "Thou shall not steal!"? Arbitrary, capricious, changing and changeable, ununderstood and unknowable by mortals, and, as we demonstrate above - expiring after so many years! La di la!

I recently downloaded a copy of Disney's "Song of the South," which that company has effectively embargoed for many years. I believe I have the moral right to do this, since there is no other practical way that I can view or enjoy this piece of art. For the same reason I also recently downloaded a rock song from the 60's that is totally out of print.

True, there are some songs I enjoy where I hardly hear them on the radio anymore and/or are so obscure, yet I love to hear them over and over again. We used to have one AM station that used to play some of those songs, but they changed formats to a Christian station so I lost my pipeline to a lot of obscure stuff I listened to in the 1970's and 1980's. I'm 36 so I do remember the technology of copying going from reel-to-reel and 8-Track, to cassette, to CD's, and MP3's. My father had a reel-to-reel recorder, I have it now, where he used to tape live shows off the TV from the audio jack on our '59 Philco and into the tape deck. I have the audio to the famous 1965 Barbra Streisand show on CBS when it was broadcast live along with a live Frank Sinatra broadcast from November of 1968.

The "RIAA Taliban" is living in the past and will go the way of the Afghani Taliban if it doesn't modernize and come up with a way to compete with file swapping. I've heard MP3's of course and the 128 bit encoding is fine although to my ears, it is somewhere between the sound quality of a good AM station to an FM one. If you encode any higher than that, you get better sound, but what's the point, the files will be so dang huge anyways. The RIAA is still living in thr world of the 1950's and 1960's, when the Germans came out with the reel-to-reel tape deck in World War II and Bing Crosby brought them over, it was the first crack to appear in the RIAA's position. Then you get into the long line of technical improvements to where we have MP3's today.

Maybe buying records is passe', so maybe the RIAA may have to find other revenue generators to pay artists and such, perhaps live performances & tours, endorsement deals for products, T-Shirts, mugs, and other merchandise, or some other venue have to come into play. All I can say is that the music industry has to find a way to shift gears somehow. Going after everyone who uses Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus, etc., isn't the answer, I mean if they did that, 90% of America would be in jail anf you'd need the 10% left as guards and other people to take care of the prisoners. Just look at Prohibition, that's a real success story too (/sarcasm) Even if the RIAA had Sharia Law on its side, it still won't stop file sharing.