The Coca-Cola company apparently has learned from the mistakes of the music industry, which alienated countless freeloading deadbeats customers when it persecuted them for stealing sharing music digitally. But Coke's down with that. In fact, it has a propaganda video that glorifies unauthorized sharing of its product:

In the video, Coke installs a modified vending machine at a college, and as students beam with love for Coke, the machine hands out various surprises, beginning with some extra bottles of product.

It's a mildly entertaining little publicity stunt, but here's what I noticed: those girls at the beginning are stealing Coke.

Remember, they ostensibly don't know it's a stunt. As far as each of them knows, she put in her quarters and a malfunctioning machine gave her more bottles than she paid for. But does she take the one drink she's entitled to and call the vending machine company to alert them to the problem? Of course not. Even though she knows it's wrong, she takes the "free" drinks and "shares" them with everyone around.

It's not surprising that she would behave this way, but it is surprising that Coca-Cola would look so approvingly upon the behavior. Would they have used the footage in their video if she and her pals had put in 50 cents and then knocked the machine over and looted it? The outcome is the same either way. Is it better morally to have stolen "passively"?

It reminds me of an incident that occurred while I was in college. Someone made a mistake one day when refilling the ATM on campus, and as a result the machine was handing out $20s when it should have been dispensing $5s or $10s (that was back when you could still get $5s and $10s from a cash machine). It's the same scenario: students, through no fault of their own, received more than they were entitled to from a machine. Did the bank take the security camera footage and make a feel-good YouTube video from it? Nope: there was no YouTube back then. So instead, they issued a very stern statement about how it was "wrong" to take money you weren't entitled to. Then they used their transaction records to track down all the people who had made off with free money, and made them give it back, under threat of prosecution.

If only we had had the YouTube back then, maybe it all could have worked out differently: we could have kept our free money and sent the video to all our friends.