Who gets paid?

Without getting into the whole debate, here’s a bit of an anecdote about music in these modern times.A few months ago I was trolling around the servers at work and I found every track of U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind sitting there as 160-bit MP3s. I also found a crazy bootleg of The Police and U2 doing a live version of The Police’s Invisible Sun. So I threw the whole lot onto a ZIP disk and took them home. That night I burned them onto an audio CD for my listening pleasure on any CD player (no MP3 player required).

Today I’m recording things onto MiniDisc so I’ll have music to listen to at the gym. I copied over the U2 CD.

This is four generations removed from the original but it sounds as crisp as new because it’s digital. And uh… I didn’t pay for it.