Once there was a pastor who preached a sermon on restitution and inexplicably left out any reference to electronic stealing—downloading music illegally, copying software, and all that. He was asked various questions about this after the message, and as a result he learned his lesson, and will never do that again. There’s the story part of this exhortation.
Can you steal an object by reproducing it? On one level, no. If you invented a machine that took a picture of your neighbor’s car, and it reproduced another car exactly like the first, while leaving the neighbor’s car right there, it would hard to say that you had stolen something.
But there is more to it. You may not have stolen a thing, but is it possible to steal something even if it is less tangible? If someone told you his brilliant idea for an invention, and you ran down to the patent office before him, would you be guilty of theft even if no material thing were involved? Certainly, you would be. You would have stolen his future profits even though you didn’t pry his window open with a crowbar and take his stereo.
Downloading music is not theft of an idea, or of a thing, but under many circumstances, it is most certainly theft. Call it theft that violates the golden rule. If you had a band, and you were trying to make a living that way, would you mind if someone spread the word about your music by copying a song and sending it to a friend? No, you wouldn’t. Would you mind if someone were standing at the counter of a music store with your CD in hand, and a friend told him to put it back—that he had that CD at home that could be copied? Yes, you would mind, and you would mind because someone was stealing from you.
Throw into the mix the fact that our legal code has had a hard time catching up with our technological ability to confuse all the issues. There are a range of fair uses that we are all trying to figure out. The thing that Christians can do is seek to figure this out with their neighbor’s interests in mind instead of their own.
Young people involved in this kind of thing should stop assuming that the sky is the limit, or that if you can do something easily that everyone else can do easily that it is somehow automatically okay to do. Doing something easily is not the same thing as doing it righteously.
And if you decide that you have offended in this, how can you make restitution? In this complicated situation, the best thing to do is to simply buy what you determine you should have bought in the first place. Obviously, I do not have a hard and fast rule for all the details of this, except for this one thing. As you decide what to do, love your neighbor—and do not ask, “Who is my neighbor?”