[LennonCook]

Originally posted by Rikard T'Aranaxz: i downloaded a lot of music from bands i never knew and i do buy the cds then i like the music.

But, like I said before, isn't it the band's responsibility to have their music heard? By downloading illegal songs and then buying the CDs, you are still giving the musicians profit, which means that their current attitude is 'working'. This can have the adverse effect of encouraging them to ignore the internet (and the freedom of distribution that it allows) and even condone it as detriment to them. T
hose people who illegally download music and then don't buy the CDs also help this attitude. Some musicians (or, more specifically, the record labels) seem to think that so long as their music is up for download, they won't profit from it. The fact that, by and large, this is exactly what is happening can't help the situation much.
What we need is a way to encourage bands to put some music up for free download, and then charge for the rest, allowing it either on purchased MP3, or on CD (and to also sell the freely downloadable albums on CD for people with less bandwidth). The way to encourage this, in my opinion, is not to download illegal music, but rather to download the legal music, and buy other music from those same bands. This gives more profit to the bands who do put sampler music up for download, while reducing the profit of those who don't. Which will have the obvious effect of making the musicians (and record labels) realise that the internet can be a useful tool for them, rather than something that is constantly working against them.

But, as I have said before in this thread, Kazaa and iMesh are not good tools for this, and this will likely be their downfall. Since there is no quality control on them, there is no way for anyone to make sure it is only legal things being downloaded, and also that it is the right file (instead of a "warped" version of the song, a different song, or a {trojan|virus|spyware|all three} dropper). The way BitTorrent works, however, is quite different (see WikiPedia), and allows for full quality control by the server, PLUS client-side validation by MD5 sum. It also makes it harder for someone to distribute illegal files on it, since one can't 'search' Bittorrent, but rather would need to search the web for a .torrent. This makes it more vulnerable to legal issues (since authorities can find a webserver, while they can't find a Kazaa user who is shielded with anonymity), and it makes it less possible for people to seed an illegal file in the first place (quickly, hands up: who here has access to a throwaway webserver that can be a dedicated BitTorrent tracker?). This also virutally elliminates the fuzzy line between what is legal and what is not. At the very least, it should take that particular issue back a few years, to "can I copy this CD and give it to my friend?" - very few people would swap copyrighted music except with people they know, rather than with 20 people who they have never known existed before, and will probably forget in 2 minutes time.

EDIT: Typo

[ 12-27-2004, 10:03 PM: Message edited by: LennonCook ]