Is using Kazaa for downloading music illegal?

[DIGITAL SCREAMS]

Genuine question......

On the website it says court of appeal said it was legal. So where do I stand if im downloading some Classic Madonna 80's tracks off someone elses computer? Am I in trouble. I dont want to break the law.

DS

[Panopticon]

I could be totally wrong about this, so don't hold me to any of it, but I've been under the impression that it's fine to download music you already own, and not o.k. to d/l stuff you haven't paid for. So, if you have those Madonna tapes/CD's in your stash somewhere, I think it's legal to d/l a copy of what you already bought...

[jasedee]

It is all illegal....

It is unauthorised copying of someone elses property

It is even illegal to tape shows from the TV. So why did they make VCR's then????

It is illegal to even make a "backup" copy of your music CD's....Then why do they make CDR's then????

It is illegal to D/L MP3 so why the fuck all these new MP3 players on the market huh????

Fuck it......Im gonna hand myself in to the nearest cop shop, cos I guess I been breaking laws since I was a kiddy, taping my fave smurf shows

[AlexHall74]

The rules of CD duplication vary from country to country.

In Europe fair use of a CD includes amking a few copies for friends/ family.

In the U.S. it is not (big surprise).

The bottom line is that for now in the U.S. courts have said it is illegal for the RIAA to suppoena the names/addy's of IP addressholders booked ata certain time for downloading a few Madonna songs.

So the RIAA can get the IP; but the ISP does not have to give the RIAA any other information due to client confidentiality laws.

Someting like it.

I stopped downloading about a year ago.
If a $5,000 lawsuit hit me I'd be cooked.
My wife would have a shit fit! :wink:


-AlexHall74

[Timo]

It's legal to download music from Kazaa etc. in Canada, as CD-R duties/levvies go directly to the recording industry!

Not that I live there, though! ;)

[blay]

the question is who is enforcing these laws and is it different for citizens of different countries?

and if so - that sucks. :evil:

[Merlot]

I stopped downloading about a year ago.
If a $5,000 lawsuit hit me I'd be cooked.
My wife would have a shit fit! :wink:
-AlexHall74

You ain't lyin!!!!! 8O

[AlexHall74]

The weird thing is, is that ilearned a hell of alot while I did download MP3s:

For instance, when I first got into elctronica I did not know many artist/song title names.

So I read the back of my CDs and serached for them on Napster/Kazaa.

BOOM!

CROSS-REFERENCING : A huge hitlist shows up of the songs you were looking for, as well as stuf that you didn't know was produced by the same artist, as well as some stuff they migh have collaborated with others on.

Then I searched ont he new artist names that I learned of on the initial search.

Also I found out about BBC's Essential Mix. I downloaded a few of them and was blown away by the cools sets that were being broadcast. I relentlessly searched the net for a place where I could buy the whole Esential Mix archive but to no avail. Then I found www.freshlymixed.com. They sell the entire 10 years (almost a few are missing) of Essential Mix, Kiss 100 Mixes, Breezeblock, and a few other odd series for $179 U.S. It came to me on 30 DVDS! I still have not even listend to half of them yet.

P2P networks were a great research tool; they just fucked a lot of artists out of the small amount of the royalties they would have received from their bigshot producers.

Now there is www.mercora.com.

Mercora functions just like Kazaa with one major difference. You can place whatever you like in your shared folder, you can search other's folders and they can search yours, but NO ONE CAN DOWNLOAD FROM EACH OTHER, you can only PLAY the tracks through the P2P like on demand radio.

This seems kind of cool as long as they don't fuck it up with ad-ware like Kazaa was.

Now I am ripping all my old CDs. Out of about 350 I have ripped 50 so I have a few more months to go.

Then I have to patch it all together.

Ultimately I want to put all of my P2P MP3s, my ripped Cds, and the EM archive onto a massive RAID5 array and save it for posterity + make it all available to me when I want to hear it instead of looking through a bunch of DVD-Rs I have had to make to archive all this shit.

Those were good days, but it is a time whose golden era has passed.

-AlexHall74

[blay]

meh. i just use it for porn. :wink:

[AlexHall74]

I conveniently left that part off... 8)

I did get some pretty hilarious fake porn files though.

The titles were someting like: "Young Blonde geting banged hard by next door neighbor" and when I opened the file it showed this chick laying in bed half asleep under the covers, she farted, and then rolled over and went to sleep!

HAHHAHAAAAHAAAA!!!!

Way to go porn industry!

[blay]

:lol: :lol: :lol:

[Wandering Kid]

its technically illegal to download/upload songs. however, you cannot be prosecuted for downloading songs because you arent the one breaching copyright. the person sending the song to you is breaching copyright. therefore, you have no fear from the law as long as you dont upload. however. not uploading anything is against the spirit of file sharing and if you do this you will find yourself remote banned with alot of users who refuse to share files with you.

lastly, there are over 60 million kazaa users that share stuff every day. this does not include any users from soulseek which i regard as a largely superior p2p network to get music. the RIAA can scare you by issuing a subpeona. a subpeona is basically a letter which informs you that legal action is being taken against you. it costs nothing to issue one of these but it does cost money (alot of money) to actually sue you for breach of copyright. its not feisible for any record company to sue all kazaa users and in either case, its difficult to prove whether you owned a copy of the songs you copied. you could for instance have sold on the cd during the time in which legal action was taken against you. you may have lost it. in many cases you could have paid cash for the cd so there is no financial record of your purchase altthough the onus is on you to prove you bought the cd. it is correct that you are allowed to make a single copy of a cd that you own for personal use or backup purposes but it is illegal to share this copy. so yes, trading cds is technically illegal too but plenty of people do it all the time. however, in the unlikely event that law calls you to question you have to have proof that you purchased the cd (receipt etc) or you are up shit creek. since ive paid cash for quite a few of my cds and lost most of those receipts i dont actually have any proof of purchase except for the cd itself which will suffice. but. i bought sonic youth's daydream nation years ago and lost the disc. i downloaded the songs off of soulseek cuz i miss that cd, one of my favs from a long time ago. as such i have illegally made a copy because i cannot prove that i purchased it. even though i did.

in either case, the chance of you being singled out is highly unlikely. 1 in 60 million? you have a better chance of being struck by lightning. it is also cost prohibitive to the record company or the RIAA to sue many people. they issue subpeonas and like to put out ambiguous threats that it 'may' be illegal to download music. the legal action they do take is normally against the big fish - the people on corporate networks that have hundreds of upload slots and share hundreds of files per day. it is in a record company's best interests to take these 'hub' users out first rather than digital screams who only popped to kazaa cuz he wanted to reminisce about what a great song holiday was. i really wouldnt fear. ive shared a few files on both kazaa and soulseek and there are 10s of millions of users on both networks which share more than i do. go for it. its extremely unlikely anything will result from it. however, if you really like the songs its recommended you buy the cds if you can. i downloaded the entire saetia discography before i bought saetia's retrospective cd. i respect level plane recordings and i appreciate that without support from their listeners, they would not be able to put out great tunes

[AlexHall74]

Good post WK,

As far as I know in the U.S. the RIAA was after "uploaders" who were sharing 750 or more files via their "My Shared Folder". If you think about it, doesn't it keep you off the radar if you limit the contents of your shared folder to let's say 400 or 500 songs?

That's what I did at the end. I put my best tunes from all genres into my shared folder. I added a prefix of the genre it was from in all caps: TRANCE-ATB-9PM Til I come; 80s-Deveo-Whip It; that way when new stuff came into my shared folder I could easily sort therough my files and the new ones. This seemed to work pretty well and I never got any messages from other users bitching that I wasn't sharing my files.

Another thing, I have a hunch that the RIAA is going after people that are sharing music that is currently selling well in the market. If everyone who was going to buy the new Nelly (blech!) album did not because of Kazaa, then the RIAA gets pissed. But who is going to care if someone picks ups some tunes that are lower on the radar such as less mainstream music that never sold too well in the first place? Again, just a hypothesis of mine that is completely not researched in any way shape or form.

WATCH OUT BRITNEY SPEARS DOWNLOADERS!!! 8O

-AlexHall74

WinMX also works better than Kazaa sometimes as Kazaa has so much paid content listed on it now...

[Bjorktribe]

You don't walk into a music store and walk out with a CD w/out paying, right? So you shouldn't be downloading it.

It still falls in the hands of whoever is distributing it though. Someone shelling out copies of their shared folder is just as guilty as that guy who is always outside of the concert hall selling bootleg tapes.

And besides (still) being overpriced, who doesn't like unwrapping their new CD and enjoying all the goodies inside? Or even being able to say 'I own this'?

Also, it's hurting the recording industries growth. If people wouldn't download Tens of thousands of dollars a day, Maybe, just maybe the record industry would say 'OK, We can afford not to charge people ten times the manufacturing cost for these disks.'

Oh well. You cant shut down the real profiters (Kazaa and others). They simply provide the transportation.

[AlexHall74]

Bjorktribe wrote:
Also, it's hurting the recording industries growth. If people wouldn't download Tens of thousands of dollars a day, Maybe, just maybe the record industry would say 'OK, We can afford not to charge people ten times the manufacturing cost for these disks.'

NOT!

The recording industry promised to lower the prices of CDs from their astronomically high entry price in the 80s once they made back their research and development money.

That never happened!

Also the DVD market is just as responsible (if not more) for the declines in record sales as DVD sales are up, up, up and that means the people buying those DVDs are buying less CDs.

When CD sales first were recorded people were buying what they had on vinyl and cassette over again so they had it in the new medium + new records that were coming out.

Well after about 5-10 years everyone had caught up with re-buying their old tunes and were concentrating on the new stuff (and hence an immediate gradual decline in CD sales).

Conveniently enough the RIAA blamed this ALL on Napster AND NOT AT ALL on the information above.

I agree though that stealing is stealing. There's no way around that.

-AlexHall74

[Bjorktribe]

Oh.

What a greedy industry! I can't wait to be a part of it :twisted:

Just the recording side of it though. I'm not that corporate.

[Timo]

I think sales of downloads (iTunes, etc.) surpassed CD sales recently in the UK.

[grs]

...the person sending the song to you is breaching copyright. therefore, you have no fear from the law as long as you dont upload. however. not uploading anything is against the spirit of file sharing and if you do this you will find yourself remote banned with alot of users who refuse to share files with you.


I've never shared and never been banned.
The Net is the new Radio. I turn on the radio and can't find a single station of interest. The future portable audio devices will be hooked up to your wireless Net account and you just upload your favorite Net streams.

[Merlot]

DS,
Where you plaing devils advocate in this thread or what? :evil: :evil: 8)

[DIGITAL SCREAMS]

DS,
Where you plaing devils advocate in this thread or what? :evil: :evil: 8)

To be honest guys......listening to MP3's isnt that great. The sound quality is poor (128-192kbps) and if I like the song enough I will buy the album....so that i can obtain the best sound quality possible on a hi-end hifi. Ive discovered so much variety of music in the last month......im now looking to buy albums by:

Lichtenfels, Nature One Inc, The Love Committie, Lasgo, John Foxx, POD, Crystal Method, Infected Mushroom, The Cure, Placebo.

Now that ive discovered these bands......I want to buy their albums. Without Kazaa.....Im not sure if I would have ever discovered these.

I personally limit the amount of downloading I do.......and I have to stress.....a 192Kbps song doesnt exactly replace a proper CD/Record version.

DS

[Merlot]

and I have to stress.....a 192Kbps song doesnt exactly replace a proper CD/Record version.
DS

Agreed. If someone recommends a band, I will check out a couple songs to see if I like them or not. If i can find them on itunes to preview it, i will, but if not then the other way it goes. Then if i do like them, i will go out and buy the cd. As musicians ourselves, I think it is important to support the artists and pay them for their creativity and hard work. With cd prices being low ($$9.99-12.99) compared to what they used to be ($16.99-$18.99), buying cds is defenitely an option now. I thing if it weren't for the development of napster or kazaa, we would still be purchasing cds at $18.99 (those damn greedy label heads). So the development of these has defenitely worked in our favor, besides the whole downloading aspect.

Also, I agree with ya DS about 192 not being able to replace cd quality.

[udenjoe]

I used to use bittorrent alot but just recently learned how it can damage your HD. The suprnova fella made exeem. It's for PC only now though. It is also in testing and there aren't many users yet.

I still will do it. I do have alot of music I have to absorb though. The RIAA uses alot of scare tactics. They often lie too. That first wave of "arrests" turned out to be false.

I welcomed the decentralized era of music. I still emrace it like a little puppy. I think now you are going to see less million dollar icons and more musicians having to work at what they do best for a living. You are going to see more work and wider varieties. You are going to see too many genres to really care. Little niches for that CD-R. And more local shows!

It's not over. Far from it. Remember the RIAA can't touch you outside the US.

[jasedee]

When do we all think the death of CD's will take place?

The new generation of youth will all be carrying around iPods, full of songs they either D/L'd illegally, or paid a measly $0.99 for.

As soon as HD space becomes cheaper and bigger, and more people have access to high speed cable internet, then we wont even need to listen to MP3, as we can D/L the 16/44.1 wavs

So, death of the CD......I reckon 5-10 years before CD retailers are forced to shut, and record companies will sell direct via internet

[AlexHall74]

After I was done downloading everything I could possibly remember to look for I began trading my entire collection for other's in exchange.

I have well over 200 GB of music, much of which I have not listened to at all.

There really is no need to download now if you make a few strategic moves like that, unless you are "browsing" or looking for something really specific.

[Nigel Harkness]

I used to use bittorrent alot but just recently learned how it can damage your HD. The suprnova fella made exeem. It's for PC only now though. It is also in testing and there aren't many users yet.

How can bittorrent damage your HD?

[udenjoe]

Nice booty. Anyway, a physicist I know told my wife. Appearently he knows alot about computers since he works with alot of those people. He said it was proven. I'm not sure how. It's her computer. Sooooooo, Buttorents are bad.

I did some searching and found this discussion. I guess it's debatable.http://forums.animesuki.com/archive/index.php/t-7909.html

[Wandering Kid]

How can bittorrent damage your HD?

its mainly the content that gets shared on bittorrent that can potentially damage your HD. im not aware of any specific bug within bittorrent that fucks you up. although to be fair this kind of happens with every file sharing app. the thing with file sharing is that people just want the files. no questions asked. so alot of people share, download and open stuff that they dont really know anything about. they dont know the original source for example. and you cant really blame someone for sharing files with spyware embedded into it or the classic quake 3 arena keygens that 90% of the time are in fact SD worms - they probably didnt know either.

thats the major reason why i find anonymous filesharing a bit dubious and i place certain restrictions on what i share. i will for example never share, download or open .exes. NEVER. quickest way to trash your HD.