Napster: ethics and installation

[Steve Poling]

>From the onion:

>either: Why would anyone in their right mind pay $12.99 for a CD with
>artwork when they could simply spend seven hours downloading the
>compressed MP3 files of all the album's songs onto their home
>computer's desktop, decompress it into an AIFF sound file, and then
>burn the data onto a blank CD?"

that says why people don't pirate software, be it EXE or MP3.

however, i've got a deeper question. how do we know that copying copyrighted
materials is wrong? when Moses wrote "thou shalt not steal," everyone
understood that if I get your loaf of bread, you don't have it any longer.
that's different from when you have a file, and give me a copy. you still
have the file.

i'm not trying to sound like RMS and say that copyrights are a positive
evil, or that information wants to be free.

Rather, i know that something is neither right nor wrong simply because
someone passes legislation. i'm pro-life and i think that abortion, though
legal, is wrong. you may disagree, but maybe you can come up with a
different example that illustrates how ethical rightness and legal rightness
are decoupled?

now, suppose enough Napster draws enough users that their political pressure
exceeds that of the RIAA's lobbyists. suppose further that congress passes a
law saying, go ahead and copy MP3s.

If copying is wrong when it's illegal, it won't become right when it's
legalized.

Decades back, Bill Gates wrote "the letter" that shook the infant
microcomputer community. he became a billionaire because we all accepted his
argument that copying is theft. What if he lied?

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This is a perl listserv, so i should probably ask a perl question. i have
been installing packages on my ActiveState Perl Win23 system via PPM.
However, PPM can't find MP3::Napster. What's the easiest way to get
MP3::Napster onto my windoze boxen?