OK, I admit it. I'm a Bad Person(tm). I put a song on my empeg that I didn't pay for.

Working for a group of radio stations, I have easy access to a vast supply of music (the complete playlists and archives of four stations) but since my musical tastes (classical) don't match up with the radio stations, this was not a temptation until yesterday, when I blatantly stole the song "I'm Gonna Be" by the Proclaimers. I have liked this song ever since I heard it as the opening music for the movie Bennie and Joon.

Now, what I did was clearly piracy -- making a copy of the song directly from the radio station's aarchives. (The nit pickers among us could argue that since the song I copied had been converted from CD to MP2, then back to .WAV, then to .MP3 it was no longer an exact copy but I waive that rationalization).

The question is: since the artists clearly allowed (indeed wanted) the radio station to play their music over the airwaves, in essence providing their music to anybody with a radio for free, would I have been guilty of piracy had I recorded that song off the airwaves and then put it in my empeg?

tanstaafl.