Kid Rock, currently topping the charts with his nostalgia smash All Summer Long, recently posted a video on YouTube attacking illegal downloading. From his country bunker, and from behind the irony curtain, he addressed the culprits: “I’m f***in’ rich. I’m not going to miss the money. While you’re about it, you need a new iPod, or a laptop? Steal it. Trust me, they won’t notice it’s gone. Want a new car? Just hot-wire a Toyota and drive it off the lot. They’re foreign, so who cares? This is Kid Rock saying, ‘It’s okay to steal music and anything else you want to.’ ” While the video has had a huge number of hits, its influence seems to have been confined to Christian groups, who have been sending e-mails to their members telling them that illegally downloading music (even gospel) is now officially a sin.

As a record producer, I recently sat on a panel that included representatives from British Music Rights (BMR), the British Academy of Composers & Songwriters, the BPI, music publishers and the ad agency Fallon (of Cadbury gorilla fame). Its task was to try to reach the worst offenders, with the message that their activities will ultimately reduce the quality and amount of good music they get. While the problem itself isn’t particularly newsworthy, the sheer scale of it is. Just one in 20 downloads is now legal, and everyone is at it, not just 15- to 25-year-olds.

The latest cultural import from America is the hard-drive party. It involves takeaway pizza, beer and the swapping of the contents of 500Gb hard drives, packed full of thousands of music tracks. My own neighbour, resolutely middle-class, with two young children at a church school, proudly told me last weekend that he has 80,000 classic tracks on a drive he got free from a friend.

At a rough guess, that’s £60,000 of stolen music — or, to put it in Kid Rock terms, 200 Sony Bravia televisions or two new 3 Series BMWs.

“The problem is that it is seen as a victimless crime,” says David Ferguson, of the British Academy, who lobbies in Europe on copyright law. “We need to protect our rights. We need to have the right to choose who uses our music, and when, how and whether we choose to charge for it or not.”

The trouble is, the law doesn’t always help us sort right from wrong. A recent green paper from the EU set out a worrying proposed amendment to copyright legislation. It will become legal for anyone in the European Union to use the music of another artist — without permission and without crediting them in any way — to create “new work”. The only proviso is that it is for use in user-generated content such as material on YouTube or MySpace. “As nobody can agree quite what that is, the proposed law is alarming to those who make their living from music,” says Florian Koempel, legal counsel for BMR, which campaigns for musicians’ rights at government level.

Unfortunately, it is often the musicians themselves who contribute to the sense of moral ambiguity. Look into the history of the business and it appears this is an industry founded on the principles of salvage, reinvention, influence and, yes, sometimes, plagiarism and theft.

YouTube has brought this issue home through a series of video posts by the American DJ Brian Redd. He has found every obscure sample on Daft Punk’s multi-million-selling album Discovery and posted video tutorials on how to re-create the entire record. This is controversial because the band credit just four samples on the record. The rest they have “transformed”, so have not credited. In many cases, acts that sample attempt to avoid sharing the writing credits with the original writer and copyright-holder of a recording by rerecording a “soundalike” track and claiming it as their own work. While this is not illegal, it may well be morally questionable. “I’m just a wedding DJ who loves Daft Punk’s music,” Redd says from his home in Milwaukee. “It’s fun for guys like me to try to work out what they’ve done — but if they try to hide the fact that they use these samples, or try to avoid paying for them, that is not cool.”

Look back even further and you realise musicians have always had elastic morals when it comes to using other people’s work. It comes under the heading of “influence”. George Harrison got into hot water with his 1970 global smash My Sweet Lord when the writer of the 1963 Chiffons song He’s So Fine filed a suit for plagiarism.

Led Zeppelin’s track Bring It on Home failed to credit Willie Dixon. Vanilla Ice sampled Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie, without permission, for his hit Ice Ice Baby.

“The question I ask of anyone who abuses copyright, steals tracks and samples or downloads music illegally is, ‘How rubbish do you want your music to be in future?’ ” Ferguson says. “Everyone will end up poorer if things carry on this way.”

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