Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Another moral quandry with YouTube and torrents

So one argument goes along these lines: "if I already own an album on CD, I have the right to torrent it because I have a right to the music."

Now this is an interesting argument because it assumes that when you purchase a CD what you are purchasing is a license to listen to the music.  As opposed to purchasing a plastic disk with music engraved upon it.

The license argument, however, is the purview of the music industry, with their DRM and licenses for music via the various "legal" music services, such as iTunes.

So tonight I wanted to listen to "Somebody That I used to know" by Gotye.  It's a very catchy tone poem.

So I pulls up the YouTubes and do the search I linked to above and found one and started playing it--but first I switched my receiver to "AV4" instead of "AV1" so that it would play the feed from my computer.

I'm jamming out and the sound cuts out for a second.  Crap.  I remember now that I've got some kind of issue with my sound box and the SPDIF connection to my receiver...whatever I won't bore you with the details, suffice to say I'm on vacation and have no desire even to be thinking about summoning the wherewithal to actually attempt the fix right now.  And besides, I'm pretty sure I'd need a new cable.

So I torrented it and listened to it on my WDTV box (switching "AV4" back to "AV1").  Took about a minute.

So, it sure looks to me like I have some right of access, since it's out there on the internet.  Or is there a moral issue with where and how the bytes are streamed from?  Even if they are exact same bytes (which they weren't in this case, I'm just suggesting).

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