Educating an NPR intern about stealing music

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David Lowery at The Trichordist aims to educate Emily White, an NPR intern who admits to buying only 15 CDs in her life, but has 11,000 songs in her library. Lowery says he doesn’t want to embarrass or shame her, but I think she should be horrified at what she’s done.



  • MacsenMcBain

    11,000 songs, and she paid for 150 or so… She needs to be embarrassed and shamed.

    • deviladv

      That’s a rather heavy handed response. Do you like to trot out kids in public so they can have rotten fruit thrown at them for stealing a candy bar too?

      • MacsenMcBain

        “NPR intern” – I’m not thinking “kid,” I’m thinking young adult, more likely than not at least college age, and thus a legal adult. And I don’t think public humiliation is a particularly “heavy handed” response, compared to jail time, fines, etc.

        • deviladv

          The point of me saying “kid” was not to refer to her as a kid, but to refer to a child who steals candy as an example of an offense similar to infringing copywrite on a song. They both cost about the same. So change my example to “an adult stealing a candy bar” and re-reply. And yes, public humiliation for such an offense is very heavy handed period. Anything is “reasonable” if you compare it to say “death by torture”, but that’s why the punishment must fit the crime. Humiliation is not a reasonable punishment for the crime of copywrite infringement. Maybe for bankers who stole billions (and even that’s a big maybe) but not for a $.99 song.

  • D Pauw

    What if she is really into public domain music? An entire album of twinkle twinkle little star!

    • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

      She’s not. She’s just dissociative. Her public education probably didn’t include a strong grounding in critical thinking.

      • deviladv

        Perhaps you’d like to put your critical thinking to the test by pointing out the fallacy you just made there?

        • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

          She admitted to having music she never paid for and only vaguely aknowledged that there might be something wrong about that, but gave more importance to her own expectations of “convenience.”

          Care to be more specific about your own conclusions?

          • deviladv

            “Her public education probably didn’t include a strong grounding in critical thinking”. That’s an ad hominem attack. I’m not talking about what she said, I’m talking about what you said. Her educational background has nothing to do with the validity of either her statement about what she was doing, nor your statement that she is dissociative and detracts strongly from your argument.

          • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

            Her education probably has a lot to do with the sloppy, self-centered reasoning in her original post. You can see similar thinking at work within a lot of similar arguments by younger people who’ve grown up within a culture that has undergone over thirty years of declining public education.

            Perhaps you believe she presented a strong case for what she does.

          • deviladv

            Again more ad hominem attacks. My opinions are below in another thread but that is irrelevant to this thread up here. If you yourself want to put for the a well reasoned argument why she is wrong, argue on the facts of the situation and don’t insult her education. David Lowery’s article is a good argument on the facts of the situation, you insulting her education is not.

          • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

            I’m making an observation based upon a variety of argument I’ve seen before. Not an attack.

            Nice use of “ad hominem,” however.

            Your argument below casts a wide net for excuses and comes up with several straw men.

            “State of mind”? Really?

          • deviladv

            You made a statement about her educational background without citation or facts to back it up. An observation is that she admitted to having 11,000 songs.

            You attacked her stating her education was the cause for her opinion without providing an argument that her opinion was invalid (and I could not resist pointing out the irony of you statement).

            An observation would also be that unless the CDs given to the studio were given out with a license that anyone who worked in the studio could copy them, she did in fact infringe on copyright, which I never disputed. You’re making a straw man when trying to point out a nonexistent straw man because my point is not that she didn’t break the law or that I’m trying to justify her breaking the law, I’m trying to say that lecturing her and punishing her for what you think is a crime is pointless and that it’s more important and more productive to look at what she is thinking and change the business model to adapt.

            Yes, state of mind, really. You still haven’t laid out an argument for anything.

  • Matt

    I don’t really understand her comment about wanting a “Spotify-like catalog you can sync to your phone.” That’s what Spotify is, if you pay for it. But I guess she doesn’t want to pay for that either.

  • Surly Driver

    I see her current college given, but nothing about her education before that.

  • http://www.soitscometothis.com SoItsComeToThis

    This is where the world is headed. You heard what she wants… something easy and vast that works wherever she is. Convenience. She went through the trouble of ripping CDs to get what she wanted. If there were only something easier than that… Hmmm…..

  • http://twitter.com/kelake Clark MacLeod

    The article is making wild assumptions about the effects of downloading pirated tracks on individual artists careers. And makes no allowances for the ingenuity of this artists who are able to find to new sources of revenue, or business models, in order to continue doing what they love.

    11,000 songs seems like an improbable amount of music for the average person. This is more about some kind of need to hoard than any argument about the convenience of having the music on hand.

  • Chuck

    The part were he talks about his two friends losing profits in the last decade shows his bias. He says they gained global popularity, more likely is that their popularity is inflated due to the internet and growing number of niche websites and communities, when looking at some of these sites you would think no name person is the most known and recognizable person on the planet. “There is no other explanation except for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists.” Or they just don’t make the music they did a decade ago, very few artist keep publishing high quality music for a decade straight.

  • deviladv

    Considering how much this blog talks about how much people want what they want and why they want Apple products, I’m shocked to see no one emphasize the point that she just wants to listen to music the way she wants to. Some here are emphasizing that she hasn’t paid for music, therefore she must be a bad person. So, if I turn on Pandora, and hit the mute button when a commercial comes up, I’m somehow a bad person because Pandora is free and I’m not “paying” for it by listening to the commercial? If I download nothing but the free song of the week am I obligated to buy something else from iTunes because I’m using energy from the server that’s serving up the song?

    One of our favorite businessmen, Jobs himself, said it best. Record companies are competing with free. Provide something the people want and they will buy it.

    And the girl’s post isn’t about what is right or wrong, she’s talking about her state of mind. From a business stand point if you don’t start taking her opinion seriously, which is the same opinion of millions of young people, and don’t start changing your business model, in the long run you are sunk.

    • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

      What she wants isn’t relevant. It’s nobody’s else’s responsibility to entice her away from convenient theft. Claiming that’s on the record companies is childish sophistry.

      My local supermarket also “competes with free,” but that doesn’t mean I’m about to make it their fault that I might steal their bread.

      • deviladv

        It’s not the record company’s fault that she infringed, it’s the record companies’ fault for not listening to what she wanted. iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, and many others have changed peoples habits significantly because they listened to what people wanted and found a way to give it to them.

        And the supermarket analogy breaks down simply because it’s not theft, it’s copyright infringement. If I download a song illegally I’ve not taken anything physically from you, which is what theft is. If I steal the bread, no one else can buy it. You have an umlimited number of copies of a digital song. What I’ve “deprived you of” is another debate entirely.

        But if I were to go with the supermarket analogy despite this, this same supermarket would sue anyone within 100 miles who had remotely the same bread formula and force everyone to buy said bread from them, or force everyone to pay them a license fee to be able to make said bread recipe. Not a business model I would think is fair to hold up just because you think you should be compensated under that model. this is what the free market is about, figuring out business models people are willing to pay for and allowing those that people aren’t willing to pay for die out.

        • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

          Were I the musician whose song you downloaded illegally, I’d strongly disagree about “deprivation.” Your “changed habits” destroy my ability to make a living on my work. That you can endlessly replicate what you took from me directly determines whether I can continue to make more of it. I don’t have an “unlimited” number of copies of whatever it is I used to create the song in the first place. But that’s not important, is it? Your “free-market” needs come first, right?

          No, you’re correct that bread isn’t intellectual property that can be licensed. Another straw man that evades the ethics, and weasels out from under Lowery’s very gentle criticism.

          You’re continuing to excuse lazy ethics and lazy theft as entitlements. Yes, it’s the record companies’ responsibility to respond to a market that has outpaced their technical capabilities. Yes, they should indeed have reacted more intelligently to the first appearance of Napster and Limewire, but they didn’t. And they largely remain unintelligent about pursuing such violations instead of coming up with better solutions that don’t alienate customers. The iTunes store (and later Amazon music) was a great solution, but neither you nor that NPR intern seem to want to be bothered with it.

          • deviladv

            The problem with your argument assumes that I would have paid for the song if I downloaded it. Most people download legally or don’t download at all. A very small fraction pirate, and most of those would simply not download if there were no way otherwise. It also gets dangerously close to the argument to imply that I’m a bad person if I simply chose not to download your song, because “I’ve changed my habits.”

            As for endlessly replicating the song, it’s true that you can’t make money off that song if I copy it endlessly. However regardless as to if that is ethical or not, my point is that your business model has a major flaw, and that is you are relying on people not copying the song! So instead of changing the business model to provide value in some other way, big corporations go out of their way to write laws to protect this flawed business model. And here we are on a blog that talks about a company who’s made it’s business on disrupting business models just like this. My point has never been “she’s a good person stop beating her up.” My point is “listen to what she has to say because your business models are not giving her value for what she wants.” Yes, free market rules here because ethics is distracting from the bigger picture. Find a better way to make money!

            Way to set up Lowery as a straw man. I’m not critiquing his article, I’m critiquing the comments that basically want to punish this intern and don’t have anything to say about how the business model is flawed even though millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of human beings on the planet feel the same way. She’s been condemned as some kind character from a grand theft auto game without consideration for the fact that her “crime” is meager and that her economic want is something that the proper business model can handle.

            The bread is an apt model because the industry right now protects a digital copy like it’s a physical manifestation of the bread itself, when in fact it’s more like a recipe. A business model based on performances, merchandise and things of a physical nature have been tried and used successfully. And by successfully I mean “able to make a decent living,” not “able to make millions of dollars off of.”

            I never said I was entitled to any music for free, and I never said she was being completely ethical either. But people in the music business are not entitled to make money under a bad business model either. In fact, they aren’t entitled to my money at all unless they provide me value, and I obtain my music legally. Yes I listen to Pandora and mute the commercials and I snap up every free deal I can find. Those are provided to me legally, and somehow those people find a profit.

            You keep harping on the ethics of pirating, and I keep going back to the point that the business model is broken and am not talking about the ethics.

    • Sam

      I doubt Pandora tracks wether you mute the sound or not, maybe they do but that would be only bad for them. They probably get payed by how many have the stream on during the commercial not the volume. When you download the free iTunes song of the week I’m pretty sure that Apple has an agreement with the artist/company or maybe pays per download themselves.

      If someone is offering you something for free it is not wrong to take it, they either get paid for it or they see it as advertisement for their music.

      The issue is that people see free downloads / streams as they do the radio. No artist makes a living from having their song on the radio, in fact most songs you hear are paid for by the record companies so the song gets exposure. The difference being that todays radio, the online streaming sites, have become so individually adjusted that you have no need to go buy music anymore because the radio only plays songs you want to hear and has effectively become your music library.

  • http://touchinterface.posterous.com/ arcsine

    It’s NPR that should be shamed.

    This reminds me of that website that posted a how-to about stealing/pirating software written by some kid.

    NPR is behaving like the worst of the pageview starved sites by posting this intern’s ‘moral failing’ or ‘foible’ just to ‘spark a conversation’.

    I won’t argue about wether this intern is a brain addled thief or just a hoarder who happens to hoard digital music files she shouldn’t have…

    That argument, conversation, whatever was timely last decade, before Apple showed that at least one model could compete with free.

    Now it’s just a young adult publicly trying to justify immature behavior under the NPR banner.

    It is this kind of inane commentary put out under a “let’s hear from you” umbrella that has pushed NPR to the low place where its on-air employees proclaim “We are Farmers, We are insurance” and go on to tout Big Daddy underwriting.