Ethics of bootleg discs?

[Weasel]

So, last week, I was at a local Goodwill store, browsing through the music CDs (sometimes some gold gets filed into those by accident; I've found numerous adventure games and Quake expansions in them by now), when I found some CD spines written in Japanese. Intrigued, I pulled one out; it was the Star Ocean: The Second Story Arrange Album. I started pulling more - Dragon Quest V on Piano, Symphonic Suite Final Fantasy, the Wild Arms OST disc, and a few others. All at 2 bucks apiece. I checked them over carefully, finding that they weren't extraordinarily obvious bootlegs (i.e. not CD-Rs with badly printed labels), but found it strange that they were all copyrighted 1999 to a company called Ever Anime. That raised some red flags, but I bought the discs anyway, because it's still damn cool to own them (and the music's pretty good too, at that).

I looked Ever Anime up, and apparently they're a Taiwanese company who published bootleg reprints of many soundtrack albums from 1997 to 2005, notable for obliterating the original copyright info and replacing it with their own. There's really nothing else wrong with these discs, but I've decided I'm keeping them, not selling them back into circulation. Is that ethical of me, to keep those around even knowing they're bootlegs? I know the real things tend to be really expensive and hard to find due to low print runs. For some reason, these bootlegs get weirdly common in certain Goodwills around here, but this is the first time I've seen bootlegs of video game soundtrack albums "in the wild."

[Discoalucard]

Back when online import shops and anime conventions were starting to get big in the late 90s, most of them sold these bootleg discs, of course never actually marking them as bootlegs. This is because they were often sold for $10-$15 each, the price of a regular American CD, instead of $30-$35 for an authentic Japanese CD. Eventually people started to catch on and they were banned from any reputable convention, though many stores still sold them on their own. Even nowadays, a vast majority of anime and video game music CDs you find on eBay are bootlegs, unless they're from a handful of reputable sellers like Otaku.com or Champ des Pins.

Are they ethical to keep? Well, they're technically not legal but these albums are long out of print so it's not really any worse than keeping MP3s around. I have sold a few of the old bootlegs I had but carefully marked them as such. (Though if you try to be honest on eBay, that'll get your auction pulled.)

I've actually run across one or two of these in my thrift store searches. I think I still have Final Fantasy USA (Mystic Quest) lying around, though I have an authentic one of that anyway.

[livingforthenight]

Personally, I would consider it relative. Much like how old roms from dead hardware isn't really making anyone REAL money anymore. More than that, because it's such niche music that would be doubly so. It's certainly not a current product taking money out of any number of anyones hands (publishers, staff ect ect).

Like how even popular music artists have notorious bootlegs from famous concerts and whatnot, everyone even the artists themselves know they exist so owning them after a length of time makes them collectors pieces. The royalties involved have most likely long been dried up. So ethically, no I don't believe there is anything wrong about it at all. You're not profiting off anyone else's work.