Question: If you buy a lamp in a store and notice, while checking out, that the pricetag on the lamp is $15
dollars when you know good and well that the lamp actually sells for $100, would you comment and pay the difference?
Question 2: If you give a cashier $50 for a purchase that was $46 and receive in change $14, do you give back the ten dollars?
Most people will answer no to the first question and yes to the second citing that in the second instance they would be harming a
single individual who will probably have to cough up the ten bucks at the end of his/her shift. Presumably, the first instance is OK because rather than harming a
single person perhaps significantly, they are harming a
multitude of people by a very small margin, the idea being that no one person can be blamed and therefore the
loss is spread wide to the company and consequently to the
public.
The same logic seems likely to explain the widespread sharing of
mp3s through
Napster. By downloading a song from some anonymous user, one is not harming one individual but in an almost negligable way, harming a
great many.