Via the Pho list, I’ve just read this piece by Glenn McDonald, a music enthusiast and frequent reviewer/essayist who has apparently “been one of the staunchest defenders of [the music industry’s] copyrights ever since the virtualization of music distribution began to challenge them.” Now he’s enumerating the reasons he’s started stealing music.

Some of them seem pretty hard to justify, if you believe that intellectual property can be considered property as such, but others seem pretty sensible. For example, his download of an Idlewild album that’s been available in Europe for months but hasn’t yet hit the U.S. market. I’ve done something like this myself.

I’ve downloaded very few movies in my time, but the ones I’ve grabbed have been for very particular reasons (and in every case, I’ve either gone to see them in theaters or purchased them on DVD later on). For example, after Dogville debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, and I read preliminary reports about it, I wanted to see it right away. I waited . . . and waited . . . and with the U.S. release date still uncertain, I decided to download it. Did this constitute theft of intellectual property? I suppose so. Does it matter, though, that I saw it in a theater twice after it finally appeared in U.S. theaters, then bought the DVD?