I stumbled on this posting from the Creative Commons weblog last week and thought it might be interesting to those of you following the rhetoric of the P2P debate represented in John Logie's article in First Monday. Magnatune, who has been trying for quite a while to build a model of music distribution and sales around allowing others to download and sample tracks from their albums, is explaining now Why we are Not Evil !

Of course Magnatune is not providing music for file sharing across P2P (although they do encourage you to copy any purchased albums to share with "up to 3 of your friends"), but this seems tangentially related enough, a response to piracy and the aggressive actions of the RIAA. Then there's the USA Today piece about Magnatune provided for download on their website whose title positions them as one of the good guys, too: Apple's iTunes Might Not Be Only Answer to Ending Piracy. What's interesting to me is that Magnatune is trying to find a place of non-evil which is outside of the typical polarized positions that Logie talks about, yet is again polarizing by using an opposite binary term.