MOLI VIEW™

Anyone who writes about music professionally, including me, receives what the record business calls "promos" — prerelease copies of CDs that are marked as the property of the label that sent them. This is a great thing. But since it's impossible to listen to all of them and hard to keep more than a few, many of them eventually end up in the world's used-CD stores. Theoretically, this isn't supposed to happen, but what difference could a few hundred critics make in a business that measures sales in the tens of thousands?

These days, quite a bit – especially if one of those advance copies ends up on a file-sharing service before the album in question is released. Late last week, the new album from Beirut was uploaded by someone who got a copy intended for the critic Erik Davis. Davis writes on his blog that this was unintentional. He believes that his Beirut advance accidentally ended up in bag of CDs that he brought down to a thrift store. I know Davis, and he's a stand-up guy, so I see no reason to doubt him. But I also think that what he wrote on his blog — and what others have written about the incident — puts him on the wrong side of a question about digital rights management (DRM) that suddenly concerns more than a few writers and publicists.

What do you get when you get a promo CD? Most writers believe you get a CD that's yours to do with as you wish. Most record company executives would say that you're essentially borrowing that CD from a company that's too gracious — or too busy — to ask for it back.

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