"Napster," Mitch said with contempt, in much the same way you might say "Nazi skinhead" or "Jesse Helms".

Mitch is a working musician. He puts in long, hard hours in his home studio making music that he's passionate about and which he hopes to make a living from. A few months ago he had to sell his entire CD collection to make ends meet. In other words, he is not Metallica, though Metallica was probably like this once.

"A bunch of musicians I know submit defective tracks to Napster," he said. "There's no way to verify the quality of what you're downloading, and most people just grab them indiscriminately. So they'll record three and a half minutes of white noise and label it as some Marilyn Manson song or whatever. Or have the song cut out halfway through. Within minutes it's been downloaded by hundreds of people. Others download it from them, and eventually there are thousands of copies floating around of this useless track."

I didn't say anything. I was thinking of the version of 'Born To Be Wild' I'd snagged online, the one that ended three-fourths of the way through.

"It's a way to get back at all these people who are ripping us off," he continued. "They don't realize that we aren't just doing this for fun; this is our work." He shook his head, the very picture of someone who feels he has been Fucked Over. "Music ain't free, kiddies," he said finally.

I considered debating the point, mentally marshaling the usual pro-Napster arguments, but just then they all sounded lame to me. I thought about the ten CDs worth of music I'd downloaded and burned a few months before, and about the people who'd made that music. However famous or obscure, they were probably a lot like my friend Mitch; ordinary men and women whose product, into which they'd poured years of blood and sweat, is being blithely copied around by people who not only won't pay for it but self-righteously proclaim that they're seizing the moral high ground in doing so. Hell, if I were them I'd probably be pissed too.

Who is the counterculture here, I wondered? Napster users sticking it to the Man by refusing to pay the record companies' ridiculously inflated prices for music? Or Mitch's friends, working-class pranksters throwing a wrench into the brave new world of the "free music" digerati?

All I knew is, I suddenly felt a lot less cool.

There's nothing morally superior about Napster, that much is true. But there isn't anything superior about clamouring for one's right to be making money on the back of art.

Art should be free. Artists should have full bellies and good lifestyles, but art should nevertheless be free. In municipal galleries, on the radio, on TV, there is already art which is not being payed for by the consumer - a convenient way around the problem of financing was found in the form of sponsorship and advertising.

One of these days we'll reconcile these two opposing principles as they apply to music - and the Napster fracas is the first step on that road.

See, I dunno, maybe this is me, but this is what I want from my music.

I want people to hear it.

Maybe that's just me. I don't want money, I'm far too stupid and idealistic for that.

If I could put music on my homenode, I would.

Maybe music isn't free, but I've never had trouble giving.

Let me tell you a story about the evolution of the "music industry."

150 years ago, before mass media, before sound reproduction technology, there was one way, and one way only, that you got to hear music.

Someone played it for you.

You have all been born, and will die, in a world that does not work that way. Try to stretch your mind and imagine what that means.

Your friend "Mitch," the Napster-hating musician, would have had a trade, which would, if he was any good at all, result in persistent, gainful employment - in bars, concert halls, as a regular or a traveler. He wouldn't have to "starve in his garage" as the cliche goes now - if he was average, like you and me, he would make an average living, playing music every night. If he was really, especially good, he could hope for "fame" - fame in 1850 was completely unrelated to what it was today, though it was coming along - there were newspapers, and within a few decades advances in paper-making technology would make them very cheap. No musician, in their wildest dreams, could have envisioned the vast accumulation of wealth today's artists - like Mitch, apparently - now feel entitled to. But if they could have understood what machine playback and distribution really meant for them, they would have fought it to a bloody death. Why?

Because it destroyed their livelihood.

In historical terms, the one-two punch of the phonograph and the radio decimated the musician's trade virtually overnight. The traveling musician that had been with us for tens of thousands of years (and perhaps much longer; music, by many acounts, predates spoken language, in human development) has practically vanished - she is now a curiosity - and a starving one. She was replaced by a machine.

What we got instead was, arguably, better music. The competition between musicians became national, and then, global. We also got, for every 10,000 artists that were no longer making a living, one celebrity. One person who would make - to use a wonderful modern idiom - "stupid money."

Oh, there was music piracy in 1850, too. Sheet music piracy. That's really, at the end of the day, a consequence of the printing press - which was just barely starting to do to the written word what the victrola would later do to music.

It didn't take very long for a few ruthless people to understand the consequences of this aberrant technology - and to exploit it to their own ends. The amazing concentration of wealth that mass media made possible quickly bent the legislators of its host countries into submission to abet it. Legislators, especially, have a unique appreciation for the power of the radio and the television - and the people who control them.

This has fostered a culture where people somehow believe our current intellectual property laws represent some kind of divine right - that God intended for there to be record companies and millionare musicians and celebrities. They don't realize the whole thing is an accident barely 100 years old. That's less than the blink of an eye in human history. They also don't, apparently, realize the consequences.

Like all aristocrats, the real beneficiaries of the current system (not the musicians, in case you were wondering - the publishers) can tend be ruthless. Propaganda is their first, and best, approach to any threat to their status. Mitch is a victim of that propaganda - he's being told that his chance to win the lottery of celebrity in the current system is "right" and that "Napster" is wrong.

However, it was an accident that put the modern musician in the place they are today - and there is nothing saying another accident might not come along and take it all away. That's a risk we all face.

Napster is not the future of music. But it represents the beginning of it. Our latest accident has made it virtually free to distribute music - and it was only a distribution stranglehold that has created the current music trust. They (the major labels, distributors, and retailers) will obviously stop at nothing to preserve their monopoly - they are willing and able to buy politicians and have absurd laws passed, in America and elsewhere.

What Mitch - the skeptical musician - thinks of Napster tells me he's ready to believe what the wrong people tell him. That's unfortunate. Napster itself will most likely not survive its bout with the RIAA - but its children will, eventually. And they will, perhaps, make music a little less of an industry and more like what it was. Where anyone can be their own record label and record store. It's about cutting out the middleman.

And they may not get rich, but they will be free.

You guys who are downloading music without paying for it are stealing, you know. Is it so hard to admit? Why do you need to come up with justifications for it, when everyone already knows anyways. You are no better than someone lifting a crate of CD's off of the back of a truck, or from a music store. The only difference is lack of physical labor involved.

Suddenly you can get songs for free on p2p products and suddenly everyone is a communist. "Art should be free." It belongs to the people!

Yeah, right.

If not for the artist, the art would not be there for you to enjoy. How can you claim to have the right something you could not possibly have on your own? You are getting something from someone else. Something you obviously enjoy. So if the artist does not want to give it away, than he/she can make that choice.

"The Napster fracas is the first step on that road." The first step on the road to getting artists treated like shit. What is the problem with paying the artist for his/her work?

"Music should be free"? It is a highly valued service, in capitalism, valuable things are paid for. Maybe if we were communists it should be free, along with everything else. But how come I don't hear people speaking so passionately that food and shelter should be free. Those are things that people need to survive. If anything should be free, it is those things.

If there is one thing that can be learned from Napster it is how flimsy most peoples morals are. Almost everyone is a thief when they can get away with it. What's worse than the thief is the thief who says he is not a thief, making up justifications.

In reply to Excalibre and others that have messaged me with similar things to say...

I believe that copying someone's material, even though it does not take something from the owner, is still stealing if you would have bought it anyways. In the Madonna example below, I do not think that is stealing because you would not have bought it anyway. It really is not different from hearing it on the radio, and I do not think that listening to something you would not buy is a concern to anyone. What I am concerned with is when you are downloading music that you would of otherwise bought.

Perhaps there are people like Excalibre who buy more music than they would if there was not p2p software. I do not know anyone else who that is true of, however. I know people who had huge collections of CD's but have not bought any at all since they started using Napster. These people would be paying for it if they could not get it for free.

So the question is whether the artist has a right to payment from these people. Under normal circumstances these guys would buy a CD. Buying a CD is paying for the privelage to listen to the music as much as you want, not for the rival, exlcudable, compact disc. People downloading music for this reason are simply ripping off the artist. These artists are distributing their product in exchange for payment. When people download music, intending to enjoy extensively (rather than just sample it or casually listen, as one would do over MTV or the radio), than they are using something that they do not deserve to have.

Repeating what I said above, music is the creation of the artist. The artist is providing somehing that you cannot get anywhere else, that is why the artist deserves to have property rights for their work. So if they choose, they can sell it.

Just because it is not a tangible, rival, excludable good, does not determine whether or not you are entitled to have it. In whatever form you get the music the same rights to the artist still apply. I recieved messages telling me, among other things, the definition of 'theft', specifying that it is taking something away from someone, when in this case it is not taking away, it is copying. Call it what you want, but it is taking something that you should have paid for, but did not.

The existence of p2p music trading has made a profound change to the economics of music. Suddenly, what was a tradable commodity, a physical good (albeit only for the hundred years or so since the invention of the phonograph) is now something completely different. Music has become a non-rivalrous good.

A rivalrous good is one that can be "possessed" - if one person has it, another person doesn't. Almost everything we think of when we imagine "goods and services" is rivalrous. Food and shelter (to use an above example) are assuredly rivalrous goods - certainly everyone has a right to eat and sleep, but then, the food you eat is food that I can't.

Music isn't like that anymore. My possession of a piece of music no longer means possession of a CD or other storage medium. I can listen to music freely in the form of mp3s without 'taking' something from someone else.

That's why our vocabulary for discussing music trading is so insufficient. Words like 'thief' don't make sense because one person's downloading of a piece of music doesn't 'take' it away from anyone else. Since many people download many more mp3s than they would ever have purchased without the technology, it's hard to claim that musicians (or anyone else involved in the process) are losing something to which they are otherwise entitled.

The struggling musician

That's not to say that p2p trading is morally acceptable - but it's a difficult question to discuss. Is it killing musicians? No. The "Mitch" in the above examples - small-time musician, struggling to survive - well, the term "starving artist" exists for a reason. The road to success for any artist is difficult, and that was true long before the mp3 revolution began. It's questionable at best whether small musicians are being hurt - indeed, it can be hard to find any music on these peer-to-peer services that's not the work of famous, established, and indeed rich artists. The Mitches of the world who have the wisdom to exploit the medium to its fullest stand to gain a lot more from the increased exposure than they lose from reduced sales.

Most likely, however, mp3 trading hasn't affected Mitch's life one way or the other. Probably relatively few people who have heard of his music have chosen to buy it as a result of mp3 trading. But I suspect a similarly small number have chosen to download his music instead of purchasing it. The people who care about small, struggling musicians enough to listen to their music probably help the musicians by attending concerts and buying albums anyway. Peer-to-peer is only a benefit to small musicians if it increases their exposure.

There is no evidence to suggest that mp3 trading is hurting small or local acts. Indeed, plenty of them seem to be making some sort of profit - albeit a small one - through providing their music freely or for a small fee through services like mp3.com. The idea of the poor starving musician whose livelihood depends on you not 'stealing' their music - an idea created and spread by the RIAA - probably doesn't exist at all. There's certainly no evidence for it, anyway.

The idea of 'theft'

If we're discussing the 'stealing' of music, we have to establish what's being stolen. Music, as I pointed out above, has become a non-rivalrous good. One person's possession of the latest hit single or some obscure garage-band's magnum opus no longer affects anyone else's possession of the item. 'Theft' means taking something else - depriving them of what is theirs. I'm certainly not depriving someone else of the ability to listen to a song by downloading it. Am I depriving them of money that they deserve? That's debatable.

A better comparison is to someone who doesn't pay taxes. Once again, it's the case of someone not making their individual contribution to a larger fund that they benefit from. Just as someone who cheats the IRS can't be stopped from receiving police protection, or national defense, it's no longer possible to stop someone who doesn't pay for music from receiving it.

That's not to say that information wants to be free. That attitude is not a postive one for those of us who like good music and want to see it continue. Nor is it a meaningful statement; it's nothing more than a meaningless rationalization of someone's actions. Not paying your taxes and not paying for your music are both harmful in the end.

The economics of it

Goods are either rivalrous or non-rivalrous, and excludable or non-excludable. Rivalrous goods are ones in which a person's ownership prevents another person from owning it. Most goods and services are rivalrous. Excludable goods are those in which it's possible to prevent people who didn't pay for them from receiving them. Thus, physical goods and services are usually rivalrous and excludable. Back when music was inseparable from its physical medium, it was too.

Now music is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. There's nothing to say that I can't listen to an album, at will, without paying. And when I do so, I'm not depriving anyone else of the ability to do so. Very few businesses want to produce goods like these, because if someone can receive something without paying for it, they have very little incentive to do so. Depending on people do do the right thing is rarely profitable.

Problem is, some very important goods are both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Clean air, national defense, fire protection, et cetera. It's not feasible to allow a foreign power to conquer some houses and not others. The examples given are public goods, and they're produced by governments in exchange for taxes. Only the government has the power to compel payment in this form.

That's what is unprecedented about the economic situation. There are few comparable examples of a private organization, without government sponsorship and support, attempting to provide something that they can't make people pay for. Imagine a company trying to sell national defense or clean beaches - a ridiculous, impossible task. People have little reason to pay for a good that they can receive for free.

The effect of downloading a song

Last week, I downloaded Madonna's new single, Die Another Day. I used KaZaa (no, I haven't gotten around to getting KaZaaLite.) It's catchy. But, if I hadn't downloaded it, I wouldn't have purchased it. I have no plans to see the movie - but it's not as though I would have attended just to hear the song. I don't even listen to the radio (except for NPR) - but the situation was the same before Napster.

So in this case - in which there is no chance of me paying for a good either way - is it wrong to download it? Well, economically speaking, it's a Pareto-optimal decision: no one was hurt, and one person - me - benefited. Pareto-optimal decisions are easy - an economist would have advised me to download the song.

The only way someone is being harmed per se is if the trading takes the place of the actual purchasing of music. I myself haven't stopped buying CDs because I can download mp3s instead. In fact, since the days of Napster, virtually every artist I've become acquainted with has been the result of music trading. I buy more music as a result of mp3 trading than I would otherwise.

The problem for the labels

So why are the labels concerned - if I buy more music as a result of mp3 trading, isn't that a good thing for everyone involved? Possibly not. You see, while I buy more music, my music choices have changed. I'm able to do the work to discover music that I've never heard of before. Things my friends don't listen to, and that I haven't heard on the radio.

That's the problem. My musical tastes have expanded. I can't interest myself in the radio. I'm not interested in the videos on MTV. I now have a CD collection much more compelling than any of the broadcast services that the labels own. mp3s enable people to find out about things that they never would otherwise, and this is not advantageous for either the labels or the marginally-talented artists who lead to most of their profit.

mp3 trading reduces the RIAA's stranglehold on the music business. Remember that the RIAA makes a lot more money than most of the artists it claims to represent. The labels that the group comprises have a real reason to fear the distribution of music through other routes - they won't be able to control the entire music industry anymore. Consider the source and you'll see that a lot of this is pure, baseless propaganda.

I suspect that the labels' real problem may be that a public who has tastes far broader than what exists on most radio stations will be less satisfied with the manufactured trends they use to sell records. That's not to say that the Britney Spearses of the world will no longer be successful - but will there be any single artist with the same ubiquity and money-making potential when everyone has access to music their local record stores wouldn't dream of stocking?

In summary

'Theft' is a woefully inadequate term for the situation of music trading, as are most terms, because the economics of it are different from just about anything else - and it's too early to say what the final effects will be. But the industry will change greatly as a result. There is really no way around that.

mp3s have made it easy to become familiar with a great deal of music. It no longer takes an enormous amount of effort to familiarize oneself with a wide variety of music. There is a potential for the average person to cultivate their musical taste in a way that only a few people cared to do before the advent of p2p.

It's hard to say the effects on the artists. No one can claim that artists are necessarily being hurt by this; as yet there is no evidence that musicians are, collectively, receiving more harm than benefit from it. What about the labels? Because, whether or not we like them, it's not morally right to 'steal' from them either. Well, that's hard to say as well - but the evidence would suggest that they are going to have to change their methods greatly. It's hard to say what the role of the labels will be in the future. Even if the record companies have hurt musicians with onerous contracts, and left good acts to languish, they have also financed the costs of many, many up-and-coming musicians.

The industry is about to change a great deal, in a way that is impossible to predict. I imagine we won't find answers for the moral dilemmas involved until the situation has unfolded a lot more. But is it immoral to download music? Downloading music is not 'stealing' it in the sense that anything else is stolen. Personally, I'd say that my downloading of music has not only benefited me, but also benefited a number of musicians whom I would probably never have heard of - and bought albums from - without p2p.

Make no mistake about it: information doesn't want to be free. The public doesn't have a divine right to hear music for free. But it's happening anyway, and what we're witnessing now is the beginning of an enormous change. I used the term 'mp3 revolution' above. p2p is going to lead to an enormous amount of change in the music business. We have a while before we'll know what's going to happen as a result of peer-to-peer music trading. The economics of music is changing, though, and any kind of judgments, moral or practical, are questionable until we can say with more certainty who is hurt and who benefits from this change.

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Excalibre has since, ironically, purchased the CD single in question. Apparently MP3 trading doesn't stop her from purchasing music.

She purchased it along with 16 other CDs. Now she has no cash whatsoever. Dammit!