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The car was recovered by the police and returned to you. Was it really stolen or were you just sharing your car ?
If they return it to you before you get up in the morning and miss it, then it's not so much of a problem, but there's still the fact that it's suffered wear and tear, had petrol used etc. i.e. it's directly incurred costs for you. The point is, if someone "took a copy" of your car somehow, then they wouldn't have stolen it; they'd have copied it.
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Because of the multiplicative nature of this distribution, it cannot be considered sharing. Playing a CD and listening to it with some friends is sharing. Copying it is not sharing; it is copying.
If you can provide a dictionary definition of sharing that supports your suggestion that duplication of something somehow precludes it from being sharing, I'll agree with you.
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Nothing garantees that anyone is going to buy from the artist or the official redistributors if they can get the music for free, or at least anymore than with our current system.
Why do you think anyone still buys CDs? As far as I can see it could be any of the following reasons:
1) People fear the legal consequences of copying - very unlikely. People have been illegally copying for years and they're aware that they're unlikely to be caught, yet you seem to think that if we remove these practically ineffectual legal restrictions then the fabric of society will collapse.
2) High speed access to the internet is still not particularly commonplace - much more likely. So people still have a need for the physical distribution of music on cd, for which there is still a market, then.
3) Artist loyalty - people feel a duty to reimburse their favourite artists for the music, or they'd feel guilty for copying it. Thus these people would probably happily contribute under the system described earlier - they'd end up paying literally no more than a 10th of what they do now, yet the artists would make more money.
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Then another term should be used. But the situation you described most certainly isn't sharing, and the fact remains that taking a taxi without paying is morally wrong.
So do you accept that copying isn't stealing? And yes, I agree that not paying for a taxi is wrong - the point I was making was that even in a situation such as that where something is undoubtedly morally wrong, it's still incorrect to term it "stealing".
(Incidentally, just in case you're going to ask what the difference between not paying for a taxi and not paying for music is, in the case of the taxi ride the taxi driver does actually incur costs for every passenger that sits in his cab and so does actually require payment for every bit of service he provides. In the case of copying music, the situation of two people sharing audio files amongst each other is a transaction that doesn't cost the artist anything and doesn't even involve them.)
The rms speech is one from
this page. I'll try to find which specific talk it is.
