More on Copying Music

Penina Cohen writes:

I have a couple of things to add to what Ms. F and Rabbi Besser said about downloading a song off of someone else's iTunes. As a Jewish music fanatic, I have seen a fair amount of CD's in my day. On most Jewish CDs it writes clearly on the front of the CD, "All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication or broadcast is against Halacha and applicable laws." This means that any time someone makes a copy of any part of this Cd without the permission of the production agnecy, they are breaking Halacha. It is like the domino affect: imagine if only one person bought a certain CD, and put it on their iTunes. Her friends then come over and put the CD on their iPods. If one of these friends has software that can transfer songs from her iPod to her iTunes, then her other firends can come to her house and download the CD. Hundreds of people can end up having this CD on their iPods, and the group only got paid for one copy of the CD. Is that really fair to them? And this is without the argument that it is against American law to duplicate a product without permission from the artist. This extends to books, inventions, and music If a group owns a copyright for their product, and someone subsequently copied that product without permission from the original group, they are stealing according to American law. In Judaism, we have the concept of dina d'malchuta dina. This means that the law of the land in which the Jews are living is the law. Even if you figure out a way to say that halachikly you are not stealing, which is hard to do, we still must obey American law as well.

As you can probably tell, I am very passionate about this subject. To me, it is the same thing as a farmer who grows apples for a living. His only way to make any money after his finding a field, planting the tress, watering them, growing them, harvesting the apples and preparing them is by selling his apples, and his assumption that people will buy them. If someone decided that they do not need to pay for the apples, and to take them without payment, everyone would agree that he is stealing. Downloading music is no different. You are taking these musiciands "apples" and they are making no money from it. I think that even with Halacha and American law aside, it is a logical, moral argument that downloading music is taking something that you have to pay for without paying, thereby stealing from these musicians.

Yasher koach for your spirited and thoughtful post, and perhaps even more impressively, for using apples as your example for our conversation about iTunes - well done. 
I think that the objections that you articulated are among the very reasons why most poskim (led by Rav Moshe) agree with you - see the articles by Rabbi Belsky and Rabbi Jachter cited previously.  However, the latter article does bring some authorities who are lenient.  If it is not assur (though again, it probably is), then there is nothing hat the record companies can write on the label that will change that.