File sharing is considered by many to be an ethical grey area. It clearly isn’t theft, as theft involves depriving someone of property (although it would seem that the record companies are doing their best to redefine the word). The only argument against file sharing that needs to really be taken seriously (in regards to its ethical, not legal, status) is whether causing the record companies to lose sales, hence reducing their profits, is ethically wrong.
In other places I have argued that how an action impacts society should guide our ethical judgments about it. Thus we regard theft as wrong because if we as a society condoned theft then ownership would be meaningless. And without ownership people aren’t motivated to create the infrastructure and developments that give us the high quality of life we enjoy now. File sharing too can be analyzed in this fashion, we simply have to ask whether a society in which file sharing was allowed would be better or worse than one without it.
It should be obvious that, by these standards, protecting someone’s sales is, in general, not an ethical obligation. In fact allowing someone’s actions to reduce the profits of another is the foundation of capitalism. If you own the only source of diamonds then you can like a monopoly, selling a small amount of your product at high prices. You will make a lot of money, but your business won’t operate at the level that is optimal for society. But if I open a diamond mine then we will be in competition. Your sales will be reduced as a result, and your profits even more so (since you can no longer price your product as if you were a monopoly), but in the end there is a net benefit to society (this is a well established fact).
So what we really need to consider is if file sharing, as an individual case, is good or bad for society, since we have seen that in at least some cases causing a company to lose sales, and reduce its profits, is good for society. It is not clear to me that if file sharing was accepted that the record companies would go under, after all some people would still want to buy CDs and other band merchandise. Someone might even set up a CD rental business like Netflix, which would give people the convenience of having the physical CD, but at a fraction of the cost*. But let us consider the “worst” case, in which the record companies do go under. Is this a bad or a good thing?
Certainly for the people who lose their jobs it would be a bad thing, but I would expect that most of them wouldn’t have too many problems finding new ones; unemployment simply isn’t that high, and most of the people working for the record labels are well educated. Besides that the only possible harm to society that I think might result would be a reduction in new music being produced. Certainly the record labels portray themselves as being integral to the production of music (by funding it), and I will assume that music, like artistic endeavors in general, has value to society.
Certainly a world without Mozart or Bach would be a poor world to live in. But wait, Mozart and Bach made their music without the support (or even existence) of any kind of record company! Like the painters and sculptors of their time, they were supported by wealthy patrons. I suppose that in this modern era it might be possible that such a system wouldn’t work, but our modern painters and sculptors seem to get along just fine (ok, well most of them have to supplement their income with other jobs, but they still are able to produce great art). So if the record companies collapsed I suspect that music would simply go back to being made in this way. That means that there would certainly be far fewer musicians than there are today, but quantity doesn’t always mean quality. Maybe we would only have one pop band. In fact I think that such a system might even encourage higher quality music, since the musicians would have to fight harder to get patrons.
Thus I conclude that file sharing can’t be considered ethically wrong. In fact the collapse of the music industry (if that is really the consequence of file sharing) might even be a good thing, turning art back into art instead of a commodity. Of course file sharing is still against the law, at least in some places, and so for legal reasons I can’t encourage you to engage in such behavior. And you might have an ethical obligation to follow the law, even if the law doesn’t have an ethical basis (a discussion which I won’t enter into here).
* If you are inspired by this to start such a service it is only fair to give me some stock.
