While some panelists at the American Forum Tuesday night claimed that downloading music and movies from the Internet infringes copyright laws, others argued that the practice will not stop and the government must modify current laws to accommodate it.
Record labels and artists traditionally made a large chunk of their profits from CD sales, and the 50 percent dive in sales between 1999 and 2002 does more than worry record executives, said David Sutphen, the vice president of government relations for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
The 1999 sales of the year's top selling albums soared to more than 60 million, while the 2002 sales peaked at a disappointing 34 million. "That the 50 percent drop coincides with the emergence of Napster and Kazaa is too much of a coincidence," Sutphen said.
Loss in profits does not concern him as much as the "loss of the ability to exercise one's exclusive right to control what one creates, how it is distributed and how it is reproduced," Sutphen said.
AU prohibits downloading music and movies on campus computers for this exact reason: respect for intellectual labor, creativity and a person's right to disseminate what he or she creates.
Some musicians remain indifferent as to how fans access their songs.
"I make music for people to listen to," Ian MacKaye, member of the D.C. punk rock band Fugazi, said at the forum. "If people are listening to my music, I don't care how they get to it."
If an artist does not mind that fans can access his music for free on the Internet, then that is his prerogative, Sutphen said. At the moment, companies such as Napster stand guilty of stealing this choice from the artist, according to Sutphen.
"Don't fool yourself into thinking that Napster is Robin Hood. It is not. It makes millions upon millions," Sutphen cautioned.
One cannot accuse a person or a company of stealing music, an intellectual good, argued Adam Eisgrau, the director of P2P United, a company that promotes allowing Internet users to exchange files with others.
"We are talking about entertainment as though it were tangible property," he said.
One cannot liken downloading music to snatching a diamond from Tiffany's, explained Eisgrau. No person other than the thief can wear the stolen jewel, but once a person downloads a song, he has not rendered the piece of music unavailable to another listener, Eisgrau said.
An abstract commodity, like music, defies traditional laws of sales and reproduction, Eisgrau said. It demands a new set of regulations that accomodate the technology age. "Current laws are out of touch," he said.
"We must recognize downloading music as a phenomenon. We should not dismiss the practice as merely a passing fad that record companies can snuff out by suing individuals who share files," Eisgrau said.
Collective licensing seems plausible as a solution, suggested Eisgrau. By levying a small tax on blank CDs or CD burners, for example, the government can compensate record labels and artists, he said. The government can "determine who is due what slice of the royalty pie and distribute it accordingly," Eisgrau added.
"If the goal is to make sure that artists get reimbursed for what are now invisible transactions, then this is a possible answer," Eisgrau said. "It is a way to turn criminals into customers."
A tax punishes the majority rather than targeting the minority guilty of downloading music, Sutphen argued. "It's simply not fair," he said.
While four of the five panelists engaged in a heated debate about this contentious issue, one remained conspicuously reticent. When MacKaye finally spoke up, his impassioned comments triggered a burst of audience applause.
"Everything up here is so far away from music," MacKaye said. "Everything boils down to money. Music is not something you can hold. It's something in the air. I look at music as something very organic and sacred - a form of communication. Music is free"
