Realistically speaking, music is not even property - for property to really be property, it needs to be tangible (something physical you can touch). [1] If it is tangible, it is easier to keep you from using it, whereas when it is intangible, I can’t. What if you hear a song on the radio which stays in your head all day long because you liked it so much? In economic terms, we call such a good “non-excludable”. [2]  Private property is both a rival good (see above), and excludable. The above shows that music is neither, even though we happen to call it “intellectual property”. That means that music can’t be private property, and copying it can’t really be theft in any normal sense of the word (see above). In addition, the moral right of the artist to be known as the author of a piece of music is also not broken by downloading. People usually sort the music on mp3-players by musician’s name, which means that we’re always recognizing that a certain artist made a certain song.  [1] Law.jrank.org, ‘Theft – Larceny’,   [2] Blakeley, Nic et al., ‘Non-excludability’, in The Economics of Knowledge: What Makes Ideas Special for Economic Growth, New Zealand Policy Perspective Paper 05/05, November 2005,