Every year, a group of French musicians band together to raise money for Les restaurants du coeur ("Restaurants of the Heart"), an organization that provides hot meals to those in need. The entertainers, who are collectively referred to as Les Enfoirés (literally, "The Dumbasses"), put on a big benefit concert, and release a CD with studio-recorded and live versions of the music. The proceeds from the concert ticket and CD sales support the charity.

I like to keep a dash of French pop music in my music collection to keep up my French language skills, and I've found the albums released by Les Enfoirés usually have a nice mix of listenable, popular tunes I can live with.

But obtaining this music outside of France is a challenge.

In a perfect world, I would be able to buy the album online — though iTunes or another digital music distribution channel — from the comfort of my desk. I wish this were possible not only because I want to compensate the artists for their work, but also because the proceeds support a worthwhile cause. For whatever reasons, though, the music never appears in the iTunes Store outside its French flavor. (Probably something to do with licensing, but that's another story.)

In theory that would leave me with two options: buy an imported CD from France or download an illegal copy of the music from a seedy corner of the Internet. Frankly, I would prefer the latter method, despite my obsession with following rules and regulations. Amazon.com, for instance, charges almost $56 for the group's 2009 compilation, Les Enfoirés font leur cinéma — the same product that sells on iTunes France for about 15 Euros.

Strangely, though, I have not been able to find a high-quality pirated copy of the album, even after months of searching. When it first occurred to me that I would never find a pirated copy of the album, I was nonplussed. Now I am in awe.

People in France, it seems, realized that putting pirated copies of the album online would deprive a laudable charity of money to do good, and they thus decided not to put pirated copies online.

As an example, I found one low-quality copy of Les Enfoirés font leur cinéma on a BitTorrent site that will remain unnamed. In the comments area on the download page, commenters fell into one of two camps. Those in the first group chastised the person responsible for posting the file for depriving the needy of food. Those in the second group implored people who downloaded the album illegally to buy a copy of the album to avoid depriving the needy of food.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw about this, but I thought it was something worth mentioning.