OK, here's one case in which music downloading WAS a bad idea

If you believe the RIAA and its allies, illegal music downloading is a multi-trillion dollar industry that directly led to the 2008 financial collapse.

If you believe that SOPA no people, downloading of music results in multiple trillions of dollars of benefits for the music industry (plus a whole lot of Facebook likes).

The truth is somewhere between these two extremes. However, I've run across one case in which music downloading truly was bad.

Since it's an Associated Press article, I won't directly quote from it. (On the other hand, I won't like to it again in this post.) But the article concerns the Arab Shooting Championships, which were recently held in Kuwait. I have never heard of these championships, but competitive shooting is certainly a popular sport that requires a lot of skill. So the Arab Shooting Championships honored the winners with a traditional medals ceremony, in which the national anthems of the winners were played.

According to AP, the people responsible for the ceremony (reportedly contractors) downloaded the national anthems from the Internet.

So when Maria Dmitrienko won a gold medal, the awards ceremony was held, and the national anthem of Kazakhstan was played.

Well, it was supposed to be played. Unfortunately, the wrong music file was downloaded, and instead of hearing the real Kazakhstan national anthem, a song that appeared in the film "Borat" was played instead.

This literally resulted in an international incident. As you may know, the Sacha Baron Cohen character Borat is not all that popular in Kazakhstan.

And I'm sure that some RIAA lawyer is saying, "See, we told you so."