Britney? Not you, too

So, Britney is going to appear as the, um, face of the RIAA in a "hey, kids, don't steal" series of commercials. Didn't her career get kick-started by the record company making free copies of stuff available and getting it circulated on the web? Apparently she's going to explain that downloading music is "like going to the record store and stealing a CD" - erm, no it isn't, actually; if you take a CD, you're removing the item and permanently stopping other people from possessing it; the fact it's been shipped and stored and manufactured means that that specific CD has had a unit cost attached to it. Downloading a track doesn't stop the track from being available to others; there are no unit costs associated with the downloading of CDs. So it's not like stealing a CD at all, little Britney. The likes of Eminem, Elton John and Madonna are all joining in a campaign about how poor artists are going to starve as a result of file-sharing, which is heart-rending; I might send Elton a thirty-five pence postal order so that he can eat tomorrow, you know.