Dave Winer: “Since the industry pays little or no money to the artist, the users can have the music, if you cut out the distributors, for $0. To blame that on people who use music is to miss the historic trend. Users are just behaving economically, not unethically; and it's even arguable that they are behaving legally.”

The following analysis makes no claim of coherency. I freely admit to the arrogance contained within it, however.

Dave Winer is half-right. Users believe they are behaving economically. Nothing in this world is free, in the economic sense of the term. It always costs someone something to do something. (Yes, always.) "Free" is just a short way of saying that the costs are being shifted to someone else. Most people who think they are getting free music actually aren't: most have invested (or had somebody invest for them) a couple thousand dollars in their computers and a few hundred dollars a year for their Internet connection. Somebody paid for it. Myself I paid for half of my computer and the full cost of my Internet connection. (Half the cost of what Dell charged for the computer and the full cost of what my Internet service provider charges me, to be more accurate.) I also pay in time and effort to download the music I want to download. It's not much effort, but it is nonzero. Then there's the opportunity cost, which is the cost of not doing something more or equally profitiable. So instead of finding a better job, studying, improving my self-esteem and appearance (for whatever reason, none of them good), I download music.

Downloading music for free also costs the musician who created that music his or her job. Not the specific musician, necessarily, but more than likely the marginal musician, "marginal" meaning the musician who is considering charging for his or her performances but as of yet is not. Why on earth would someone want to perform for money when people are taking the music they made without paying for it?

Dave also says that musicians aren't getting any money for their music. That's flatly wrong: many get lump sum payments for signing (and yet, for some reason, musicians don't ask for publishing rights), where the real money is. Evidently starting your own record company will get you a bigger percentage of profits from your music, if not a bigger absolute sum of money.

I recently bought an excellent album by Kenna, which was distributed by a heartless multinational corporation. I don't believe for a second that Kenna is making bucketloads of money from the sale of the album, but in purchasing the album, I'm placing my hopes that Sony will take more risks in signing bands like Kenna, because at least they will get my hard-earned (ha!) money. It's also in the economic interest of labels like Sony Music to invest in digital music trading technology and profit it from it, at least from a guy like me, because I believe in rewarding good music with dollars. The vast majority of the CDs I've bought over the last two years were a direct result of having listened to the songs on MP3 format. That's worth repeating: my sole reason for making my purchase decision was having listened to them before-hand on an inferior-to-CD format. It's the part I don't get about these lawsuits: why sue when you can simply co-opt?

I don't think that the way labels are set up now is a perfect system. It's actually an abominable one. But whether they know it or not, musicians are ceding their property to the music labels. (Why are musicians blameless in this whole deal? They sign the contracts too!) As a shareholder of a for-profit enterprise, Dave Winer should know better than anyone else that a moral argument to companies isn't the most effective way to convince it to change its behaviour. Companies mostly about money. So let's make an economic argument for free downloading! Let's make it in their economic interest for us to cheaply and easily download music, old and new. People illegally downloading music is an economic issue requiring an economic solution, not a moral one.