Whenever this question comes up on Catholic Answers, it receives a plethora of responses. It is very, very tricky -- thus agonizing -- Party Is Over, especially for those who feel it might have some bearing on their salvation but can't get anything remotely like a clear, consistent answer. I think trads probably download less music than Novus Ordo Catholics, but I wasn't always a trad nor a Novus Ordo Catholic. That isn't to say that I did or didn't download thousands upon thousands of CDs before I was baptized.
I thought this would be interesting for certain more theologically experienced minds to investigate. Many of the Catholic Answers people, who probably are extremely liberal with dogmatic theology, are extraordinarily strict and Pharisee-like when it comes to moral theology. There are some on that site who say downloading music is "stealing" point blank, every time, and this is clearly wrong for the following reasons:
( a ) We are supposed to follow the secular law, yes, but the spirit of it and not the letter -- does anyone drive at PRECISELY the speed limit?
( b ) There is the matter of people recording songs off the radio. Some say that only certain songs are played on the radio, the ones the record company releases to the public, but in reality, sometimes the entire album is played, or other songs not released officially are played.
On classical music stations, an entire piano or violin concerto or symphony that comprises more than half of a current release is commonly played. Would it be wrong to record music off of this station? I think everyone would agree it would be scrupulous to say yes.
The logic is, "Well, the copy won't sound quite as good." Okay -- then I'll use the same logic for a downloaded CD, such as that you don't get the cover art and liner art, the notes, the lyrics, the whole "experience" of buying a CD, complete with pictures of the scantily-clad "star" who made it. Sometimes the CDs you buy have special features, videos that you gain access to if you pop it in the computer player. Therefore, just as a recording off the radio is not the same, a downloaded CD is not the same as one you buy.
( c ) We are supposed to follow just laws. Many of the laws regarding copyright are incoherent, unjust, insane, or a combination of the three. People will be randomly sued for downloading music, people who have 20 songs on their computer perhaps, while others have a million, and they will be asked to pay some arbitrarily high amount of money. Would the people who think downloading music is theft dare to justify that kind of craziness?
( d ) Copyright infringment is not the same as theft. This is a critical distinction people miss when they try to bring in the 6th commandment.
Someone on Catholic Answers with a more nuanced, Jesuitical mind -- which is required to figure this problem out -- brought up a decision of the Supreme Court, Dowling v. United States:
"[Copyright infringement ] does not easily equate with theft, conversion or fraud... The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over copyright, not does he wholly deprive its owner of its use."
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I am not saying that it's right to download music and never pay for it. But if you download it for the purpose of sampling a CD, though this is not what the record companies want, you cannot call it theft. It just goes against what they want, and what they have manipulated ( bought? ) the law into going along with.
If a sin is involved in downloading just to sample, it is the sin of breaking the law. But let's face it, we all do that in numerous ways every day. It would be impossible to live in this red-tape-festooned society if we didn't.
While the recording companies don't want people to download music, going against their wants isn't necessarily stealing. Stealing is when someone is deprived of a good that belongs to them. There is no way to say that someone who downloads a CD isn't borrowing rather than stealing; it's all about his intent. Someone who does this may actually have no intention whatsoever to buy a certain CD, but since he can download it for free, he does so. The record company does not actually LOSE anything, the way that a seller of antiques loses something if someone comes into his store and makes off with an emerald-encrusted Tiki mask.
In fact, the record company may gain something, because this person who otherwise wouldn't be interested may end up liking the downloaded CD so much that he buys it. This adds more grey area. Can anyone say that downloading harms record sales instead of increasing them? It is evident that it gives certain artists more exposure than they would have otherwise, and that they tacitly support it for that reason. Unexpected benefits to the record companies would not, of course, justify the theft of CDs, if downloading was always theft. But I have just shown, I believe, why it isn't.
Where the record company / artist do lose something is if someone who WOULD buy the music otherwise doesn't do so, because he is satisfied with his copy.
Therefore, to me, if there is a line to be crossed, it is crossed when the intention becomes to keep the downloaded copy and never buy a hard copy. For this to happen, the file-sharer in question would have to know ( a ) That he wants this particular CD in his collection and ( b ) That, nevertheless, he intends never to purchase it. He could have a CD for years and years without ever reaching this point, perhaps being on the fence quasi-permanently about certain CDs.
It would be very hard to ever say when someone has stolen the thing or not. It would be between God and the file-sharer, like NFP is between the priest and the couple and God. There are no fixed rules for using it, just like there are no fixed rules for the ethics of downloading. You just have to listen to what God is telling you. If you really, really like something and never want to be without it, then buy it. You have to be careful not to fool yourself into thinking you are only lukewarm about a certain CD, to give yourself an excuse not to buy it, when in reality you love it. If you find yourself playing it more than once a week, that would be your first clue. But I know of a person ( not saying it's necessarily me ) who had tons of downloaded CDs that he never got around to listening to at all, or heard only once, or only in part. Could this be theft?
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That is what I have come up with. Keep in mind this is just a layman's opinion reached after a day of contemplation, and thus is worth absolutely zilch. No one should act on my advice. On second thought, I'm not giving any advice, but rather thinking out loud.
I am going to ask Father Gabriel at CMRI to see what he thinks. I already did ask Father Dominic, but he seemed unsure, as most people are on this topic. He zig-zagged and made it about something else -- does the person who downloaded the music know, at the time they do so, that they are stealing? If they don't, then it is not sin. I think sometimes that is hard to assess, though, because to this day, no one knows if it's stealing or not, the way that EVERYONE knows that taking a gold nugget from an old lady's house is stealing. I think that the reason why no one knows if it is or isn't stealing has been solved in this post -- it doesn't become stealing or anything even close to it unless you have a firm intention to NEVER buy the CD you have downloaded. In my opinion...
People who do it will often feel that something is wrong with what they're doing, especially when they reach the point where they realize they're no longer buying CDs and are just downloading everything. But I don't think they would equate the "wrongness" they feel to something as clear-cut as theft. It's more like an indefinite borrowing that has uncomfortable similarities to theft, and can become theft, but in a way that is very hard to acknowledge or recognize, while "classic" kinds of theft, like shoplifting, are blatantly theft.
There is another aspect to all this, something that no one on Catholic Answers even mentioned -- whether, if it is a sin to download music, reparation must be made. Most of them assume that it's enough to just get rid of the downloads. But this is an inconsistency. If it is theft, shouldn't reparation be made?
Topic: Agonizing moral theology question -- (Read 6441 times)