Is pirate music ever justified? Krystian Zimerman, one of today's very greatest pianists and a man of exceptional intelligence and integrity, stormed off the platform in the middle of a recital in Germany earlier this week when he noticed someone recording him on an iPhone, presumably for distribution on YouTube. Having berated the audience with a reminder that the classical music industry was being decimated by all such pirate recording, he resumed his recital but refused to give an encore. The incident follows a similar strop by the actor James McAvoy, who recently broke off a performance of Macbeth in London to tear a strip off people in the audience who were taking photographs of him in flagrante. Of course, as a matter of natural justice, I am instinctively on Zimerman's side. Not only is his copyright being breached and his services stolen, but there is a matter of sheer bad manners involved - the recording was not only distracting to the pianist but also to other members of the audience. The offender should have been ejected from his seat and had his ticket rescinded. But I realise I am being a hypocrite when I write this. I adore YouTube and explore its musical riches continually. I have also been listening today to a fabulous 1951 pirate recording of Maria Callas singing Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani - a bootleg tape of an actual performance, now transferred to CD, which crackles with excitement. I have many such CDs and LPs, as do most music lovers, and I treasure them. But not one penny of the proceeds from their sale has ever found its way back to the artists who created the music, so I am party to the initial theft - and ultimately complicit in the guilt of the man at Zimerman's concert in Essen. How can one reconcile a performing artist's right to own and sell his or her work with another equally important imperative - preserving the historical record? There is no commercial recording of Callas singing Vespri, and posterity is fortunate that her interpretation survives. Nobody has ever come up with a satisfactory proposal for levying some sort of creatives" fee for material freely loaded for internet broadcast, and unless all ticket holders for performances submit to a body search and have electronic equipment confiscated in the manner of airport security checkpoints, it will also be impossible to eliminate pirate recording. Given the current state of technology, the situation is simply uncontrollable and artists and the industry will be the inevitable losers, at least financially. Incidentally, I know Zimerman is not averse to using the new technology himself in covert fashion. A few years ago, I met him after a Royal Festival Hall concert and he told me that he had kept his mobile phone on in his pocket throughout his incandescent performance of the Chopin B minor sonata. On the receiving end was a friend with terminal cancer who wanted to hear him play this piece once more before he died. Heartbreaking.