Re:Anonymity in copies; freedom of music (Score 1)

Well, besides scale and quality (and digital rips | digital copies at least have the potential to sound as good as the originals) the other factor involved in Naptster (and net copying more generally, as in hotline) is anonymity. When I used to get tapes of records from my friends, that was just it--they were my friends, and the tapes were a labor of love or at least friendship. Likewise, I made lots of tapes for my friends, some requested, others just because I had to turn them onto some music I liked. When I use Naptster (or gnutella or websites or hotline) I generally have no clue who is providing me with the music--and it doesn't matter. Likewise, people are constantly downloading stuff from my harddrive and I make no effort to monitor them, let alone get to know them personally. Home taping has a self-limiting factor, in the size of friendship circles. Even old-fashioned "taping trees" (designed to maximize the convenience of making lots of semi-anonymous copies of live bootlegs) tend to limit at a small size (relative to sales of the same artists' major-label releases). I do think that people are using Napster at least some of the time to avoid buying CD's of songs that they might otherwise buy. And I agree that the artists who originate the music should have some right to say whether and how that music may be distributed, and especially that they deserve a cut if someone's making money off the distribution. If you want the equivalent of free software (as in speech, not just beer), then join the folk music movement. People there share songs because they like to play them together, and to hear how the songs grow and change as they get passed from player to player. But taking prerecorded music from the musicians withouth their permission is something like theft (even if it doesn't leave the artist with an empty warehouse).