I was in agreement with James Peterson’s recent column (“Keep on downloading in the free world,” Feb. 1) until he got to the part about intellectual property. Peterson wrote that, “Theft of intellectual property involves stealing someone else’s work and labeling it yours or using it to make money for yourself.”

That is true — you cannot legally burn copies of an Interpol album and sell them to pay for textbooks — but copyright laws also protect against the unlawful redistribution of intellectual property even when money isn’t involved. According to the Web site of the United States Copyright Office, “Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution.” Even if no money changes hands, sharing music is a copyright infringement. It might not have the stigma of shoplifting a CD from a music store, but when you’re taking someone else’s property without permission, I don’t know what else to call it but stealing.

Put it this way — at the bottom of the home page of the Iowa State Daily Online Edition is the following statement: “Copyright c 1995-2004, Iowa State Daily, Iowa State University. All rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced, in part or in full, without the consent of the Iowa State Daily.” If sharing intellectual property isn’t stealing — if we should have free reign to download or share any music, artwork, literature or journalism that we find online — then I guess the Daily wouldn’t mind if I copied the text of all the articles and posted them on my own Web site. My guess is, if I did so, I would receive an angry letter from the Daily’s lawyers.

We can argue whether or not there should be a “fair use” provision that would allow users to sample online music files on a short-term basis for free. We can all probably agree that most CDs are a rip-off.

But, unless the copyright laws in the United States are changed, taking intellectual property without paying for it will remain illegal, and file-sharers do so at their own risk.

Jacob Wegman

Graduate Student

English