By copying mp3s you are not depriving anyone of their “real” property, only their “legal” property. Every copy of bits is a separate copy, it does not matter that the bits in my pc match the bits you authored, they are still my bits. Just because some state decides that numbers can be owned by someone does not make it ethical to own numbers (abstract ideas).

The only justification for the concept of property is scarcity. Without scarcity, property is meaningless. Information is an abstract concept, it is not of the physical world, and while any representation of the abstract in the physical world can be ethically bound by property rights, the abstract itself cannot.

Therefor, if I break into your house to copy your mp3, I have violated your property rights, but if you voluntarily let me view your mp3 long enough to copy it, you do not own the copy I make (remember the copy is implemented on my physical hardware). If not, you are saying the you would suddenly magically own my harddrive.

One way to view it is to think about secrets. What sort of natural restrictions could one put on secrets? Answering this question in a free market way is the answer to your question.

In a free market, it would likely be impossible to sell a secret such as “Mary likes John” and blankly claim that the recipient cannot further pass on this information after the sale? The only free market approach that would likely resemble this arrangement is a contract. But a free market contract would only be able to specify restrictions on the secret via compensation costs for contract infractions. These costs would not be arbitrary, they would have to be voluntarily agreed upon by both parties up front.

Although such a contract might on the surface appear to be the same thing as copyright, it would actually be quite different. One clear difference would be that this contract would need to be explicitly and voluntarily entered by the parties involved. You could not simply broadcast a secret to the world and claim it to be a secret that everyone is now bound by! Also, if someone overhears a secret during other parties’ contract negotiations, the overhearer would not be bound by the negotiators’ contract.

Why is stealing mp3s only legal thievery?

Because you aren’t facing the person from whom you are stealing?

Does the issuer of a product have the right to define the terms under which you buy it from him? Because most recording artists (or their contracting agents) have stated that they intend purchased mp3s to be used by the purchaser only, not spread to millions of anonymous “friends”.

I used to download music when I was a kid, but could never reconcile how it was any different than stealing CDs from a record store, except that in the former case, the only one to stop me was myself. And isn’t that the essence of morality: still doing right when no one is looking?