Share and share alike -- that's what we were taught when we were kids.
It's an admirable ethos to live by, but it's anathema to the recording industry, which sees online music file-sharing as only slightly less reprehensible than baby-killing.
The Recording Industry Association of Japan, which represents this country's major record labels, recently got a lot of media attention when it released a report (which should have been titled "File-sharing: threat or menace?") claiming that no fewer than 75 million songs have been downloaded -- mostly illegally -- in Japan since online file-sharing services started becoming popular here a couple of years ago.