Those who engage in music piracy will often list a familiar set of excuses to justify IP theft: the album is too expensive, the labels don’t make it available in digital format, artists don’t receive a big enough portion of album revenues, downloaded albums serve as promotional tools for the band’s concerts and merchandise, the list goes on.

That’s why I was dismayed, but really not surprised, to see how quickly the Haiti benefit album “Hope for Haiti Now” cropped up on all the popular BitTorrent indexing sites like ThePirateBay and Torrentz. No matter how much the operators of these websites like to portray themselves as “digital revolutionaries” who are encouraging the adoption of “new business models” (i.e. “please compete with free”), there is really no excuse or justification for hosting a website where users can obtain this album for free. What possible justification can one give for uploading, downloading, or making available this album over the BitTorrent network?

Not only that, but out of the 9 front-page Google results for “Hope For Haiti Now torrent”, a dismaying 5 out of the 9 results (Torrentz, IsoHunt, BTJunkie, Monova, TorrentZap) are hosted or have some connection to Canada. No matter what these website operators’ opinions are of record labels and movie studios, wouldn’t you think that they would take at least some steps to ensure their services aren’t used to pirate a $7.99 charity album?

Looks to me like the Pirates of the Caribbean can be found right here in Canada. At least we’re also good at legitimately hauling in the gold as well.

For those of you who have yet to pick up this truly amazing album, which also serves a great cause, there is no shortage of legal sources where it can be obtained. I highly recommend heading to iTunes or Amazon and ordering a copy.

On another positive note, this album just set the record as the first digital-only release to top the Billboard Album Chart!