Corporate sponsorship vs. Integrity: Choose a side. (Updated)

Songs, which describes itself as a service-oriented music publishing company, licenses a lot of cool bands for commercials, movies, TV promos, and the like. Bands like Junip. Sleigh Bells. And Ghost Beach. Songs was instrumental in securing a licensing deal for “Miracle” as part of the return of American Eagle’s ongoing “Project Live your Life,” campaign.
“Project live Your Life” is more than a crowdsourced campaign. Okay, no it isn’t. It’s totally a crowdsourced campaign.
This from American Eagle's website.

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because for the past week we here at adland have been trying to follow the money (or at least the donated billboard media) trail, before we explored the concept. Our friends over at Music Tech Policy and Trichordist have been doing the same. Why? Because it smells. No one donates media for free, especially in Times Square, unless there's a damn good reason.
As for the campaign itself? Beyond just something made to enter in the award shows? It’s also not really taking any sort of stand, but merely “creating a dialogue,” or whatever the hell one does when one doesn’t want to stake a stand. It’s not like this is a scientific measurement. Even the name is a misnomer. Judging by the live feed, most of the people tweeting aren’t even musicians, let alone having a "dialogue."
Unless this counts as a dialogue:

@ghostbeach Who cares? The campaign is a promo: up until 2 mins ago I'd never heard of Ghost Bach #artistsforpiracy #artistsagainstpiracy

— Patrick Montgomery (@amazingtog) March 22, 2013

I like how one person (a record label owner, mind you) summed up the pro-musicians rights on Ghost Beach’s Facebook page:

“Artists for piracy is like the ceo of bestbuy going on tv and saying "Hey America, come loot our store". Moronic. Giving away a free sampler of a bands music is a good idea but why should we support things like discography torrents? I work too hard to support the wholesale theft of my own shit.”

The weirdest part of this story is that American Eagle initially denied having anything to do with the media placement, free or otherwise. Chris Castle from Music Tech Policy reached out to American Eagle and got conflicting reports. First that American Eagle Outfitters was not affiliated with the campaign. And then later that they paid the band “a nice fee,” for usage. Was that fee in exchange for using their music for a big social media campaign, I wonder? Or did you pay them nothing and donate the media billboard? And what does "nice fee" mean, exactly?
Our answers from TBWA have stated definitively that American Eagle was behind it.
As well as sources close to the band.
American Eagle may have been trying initially to distance itself from what what might have been anticipated controversy. Should some people get it into their heads that a corporation is essentially attaching its name to a pro-piracy campaign, while using music from bands at the same time. It wouldn't necessarily take some eye squinting to see how it might be construed as corporate sponsored piracy.
And let's be honest--the way Artists vs Artists is shaping up now, it's just a number count with a lot of people in favor it stealing music. Again, I don't see any "dialogue," happening.
As for Ghost Beach, on their web site their mission statement says this:

Our hope with this campaign is to stimulate the discussion on exactly what 'piracy' means to different people. To an older industry sector, it's a dirty word that implies theft. From a younger, purely consumer standpoint it's another term for distribution. As it stands now, we're more closely aligned with the music consumer - in the sense that we are for this new distribution model, as evident by our efforts thus far to make Ghost Beach original music available for free to fans.

Gee, really? I'm so surprised. You ask people if they're in favor pirating music, and you're surprised they say yes? And also surprised not as many artists chimed in as consumers? Guess we need to work on our media placement.

One of the tougher obstacles in developing this campaign was figuring out how to present all sides of the debate, as it’s not a simple black-and-white issue. We realized we couldn’t with just the billboard and the website, but by presenting the subject in stark contrast as simply ‘for’ or ‘against,’ we hoped to ignite a debate outside of the AVA website. We think we’ve succeeded in doing so. We found there to be heated conversation on both sides of the issue on Facebook, Twitter and various blogs and websites. We’ve received an overwhelming amount of criticism and an overwhelming amount of support surrounding the campaign and the issue, which to us means that we’re doing something right. This is still, very much, a relevant topic.

Furthermore, we know what the literal definition of piracy is and we know that us giving away our music for free does not equate to piracy -- under any terms. We believe in using new music sharing platforms to combat illegal downloading by offering the modern music consumer convenient choices when it comes to discovering and downloading new music. We believe the only way to truly move forward on this issue is to continue talking about it and support strategies that work with the distribution network the Internet provides, while still protecting the intellectual property of artists. The next step in this discussion is calculating fair royalty rates for artists and labels through the many streaming services that have been developed.

Again, not one person has ever, ever suggested that Ghost Beach giving their own music away for free is piracy. No one. Ever. Not. Once. As for believing in new music sharing platforms to combat illegal downloading by offering convenient choice, I so agree. I mean, with the exception of Spotify, Pandora, Itunes, Amazon, I Heart Radio, Google Play, Last.fm, The Hype Machine, and Pitchfork, Paste and Magnet providing free mp3's not to mention Bandcamp, Blip.fm, 8tracks, and Soundcloud, there's just no convenient way to stream music at all.

As a band, we have built our entire foundation by sharing our music for free on the Internet. Since our launch in October 2011 we have given away 11 free, original singles, as well as a few remixes. We haven’t pressed a single piece of physical music product. We started our own label Crazy Heart Records to release the music, with one simple objective; to offer music listeners a choice of how to access and listen to our music.

While all of our future content may not be available for free, we will continue to have much of our catalogue available for free online throughout our career as Ghost Beach. Every song we’ve released thus far has been available to stream, purchase or download for free (directly from us). We’ve found that this approach has helped us develop a very solid fan base and community around our band on the Internet and in the real world at our concerts. We look forward to continuing to develop that community, and would like to thank everyone who has contributed thus far via commenting on the AVA campaign, a paid download, a free download, streaming a song, licensing a song or coming out to a show.