It is ironic that many listen to worship music that they obtained illegally.
Tim Challies:
Despite the clarity of the law, many people continue to ignore it. This is true both within the church and without. A Barna report (link) from 2004 showed that only 1 in 10 Christian teenagers believe that music piracy is morally wrong. This varied very little from the percentage of non-Christian teenagers who believe the same. I don’t think a lot has changed over the past 6 years except that more and more adults are now equally ambiguous about piracy. After all, everyone’s doing it, and when everyone does something, it is easy to think that we can do it too.
As Bob says, “Christians have a higher standard than ‘everyone’s doing it.’ Romans 13:1, Deut. 5:19, and Eph. 4:28 come to mind. While file sharing, copying CD’s for friends, and downloading music illegally is easy and attractive, it’s still wrong, despite our rationalizations.” I have been amazed in talking to friends, and young people in particular, just how little they care for copyright laws. Excuses abound: “Everyone is doing it. The music companies don’t really care. The artists say they don’t care if we download their music.” I am even more amazed when I hear young people talk about pirating Christian music (I recently spoke to a young man who had pretty well the complete Sovereign Grace music collection but it was all illegally copied). I’ve even spoken to people who laugh, saying, “You don’t want to lend me your music. I’ll just copy it.” Long before I stopped buying CDs (I now buy almost all of my music online) I stopped loaning those CDs to other people.
