Music Download

I decided to write this article after a friend told me in all sincerity that the money she paid to purchase Kazaa went to compensate the artists whose music she downloaded. She had no idea she was violating anyone's copyright.

I figure that most peer-to-peer file traders, while probably aware they are violating copyrights, aren't much more clued in than my friend. While I have your attention I feel I should also explain some of the legal and historical issues around copyright, and suggest steps you can take to make file sharing legal.

If you don't think that violating copyright by downloading music with filesharing programs like Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, Madster, eDonkey, Direct Connect, OpenNap, iMesh, or Gnutella could get you in serious trouble, then you need to read RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Against FileSwappers and House Bill to Make File-Sharing an Automatic Felony

The RIAA is using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to force internet service providers to turn over the names of file traders. They can determine your internet protocol address by connecting with your peer-to-peer client over the Internet. Using your IP address and the time you were connected, the ISP can determine your name. If the RIAA finds you this way, they will sue you.

When you are the defendant in a civil lawsuit, you don't have the protection against self-incrimination that the U.S. Constitution grants criminal defendants. You will be required to give a deposition in which the party suing you will be able to ask you anything they want, while you will be required to give truthful answers under oath. In addition, your friends may be subpoenaed and compelled to testify as witnesses against you.

In civil lawsuits, there is a process called "discovery" that allows the party suing you to use the force of law to require you to turn over any evidence they ask for. In particular, they can seize your computer and forensically examine your hard drive (so that they might even recover files you've deleted), read any logs of email you've saved, obtain your telephone records from your phone company and obtain the log files from your ISP as well as the log files from any Web sites you've ever visited.

The RIAA has had limited success at suing the publishers of file sharing software. Some systems, like Gnutella, are so decentralized that there is little hope of finding anyone to sue. So now they are coming after the individual file traders - meaning you. The article above says the RIAA has already obtained subpoenas against 871 file traders, and will likely have obtained many more by the time you read this. They are asking for $150,000 in damages from each file trader for each song whose copyright they have violated. What will they use the money for? Suing more file traders, of course.

If you lose one of these lawsuits, the only recourse you will have will be to declare bankruptcy. If you're a juvenile, your parents will have to declare bankruptcy.

While simple copyright infringement is a civil offense where the copyright holder's only recourse is to sue you, especially egregious offenses are already criminal violations for which the law enforcement authorities will arrest, prosecute and imprison you.Remember the FBI warning you always see at the beginning of movie videos? It is common for large-scale software pirates to be arrested. File traders are next in line.

You can avoid all of these problems by enjoying music from the tens of thousands of talented musicians who offer legal downloads of their music. And you can tell the RIAA to kiss your ass.

You may ask how musicians are able to earn money if they offer free music downloads. The simple answer is that they will make money as they always have, by selling recordings, playing live concerts, and selling such merchandise as T-shirts.

While one might be satisfied by listening to downloaded music, many people report that they often purchase a band's CD after hearing their downloads. I can easily tell that compact disc recordings sound better than most MP3 files, and it's nice to have a labeled CD, package and liner notes.

There are some who advocate that all music ought to be freely available and sharable, and suggest that musicians be supported through tips. Only a small fraction of those who download a given song need to contribute for most artists to make a comfortable living. The Street Performer Protocol is one method proposed for paying for many kinds of works, not just music. The non-profit organization musiclink collects tips from fans and distributes it to musicians with very little overhead.

It's difficult to find music that's actually worth listening to. Although many bands offer music on their websites, there's no real way to tell if it's any good without actually downloading it. The labels do serve the (somewhat) legitimate purpose of picking out the good from the bad. But we can do that ourselves with legal downloads by using collaborative filtering, for example by downloading our music with iRATE radio

iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from Web sites which allow free downloads of their music.