Music download

[cuddlycat]

They are now saying that anyone who downloads music from the internet will be found and prosecuted. Even if you only download small amounts. How realistic is that and is it really happening?

[BadBob]

Totally unrealistic if you ask me. I tend to use these sort of sites as a preview service. I'll download a track listen to it and if I like it buy the album, if I don't I won't, from my perspective its only increased the music I buy. Would book publishers prosecute people for reading sections of a book in a book store. If they feel they want to prosecute me I'd be happy to go to court and defend myself. The way I see it is that there are 2 main groups in this, those who download with the intention of copying and selling the material and those who just do it to listen to it. For years people have had access to the radio and cassette tapes, buying a record is a bit more than just paying to listen to something, its showing your gratitued to the artist, a statment saying "this is worth paying money for"

[BadBob]

If its happening or not I couldn't say but as for actually doing it I would say its virtually impossible. Its just a scare tactic to try and stop people doing it. I think some people have the same opinion as mine which is, the record companies have been ripping us off for years, this is just a little bit of payback.

[kags]

I heard (and this may be completely wrong) that it is not actually illegal to download a piece of music, but it is illegal to allow others to download from you, as you are then infringing the copyright. I have only used WinMx, and on that you can have a look at all the available files of someone who is downloading a track from you - you can therefore see if that person is "not sharing" - ie moving all his files to another directory that is not specified as the one to share. If everybody does this then there will be no more files to download. I agree with BadBob, it hasn't made me buy less cds, because downloading a whole cd is a bit of a pain. Mostly I download stuff you can't buy anymore and last week I tried buying a cd single but couldn't because it isn't in the charts, so I thought "sod 'em" and downloaded it!!!!

[lisaj]

It's impossible to enforce, and the record execs whose private jets and limos are now in doubt are simply bricking themselves at the prospect of losing a slice of their considerable wealth. Therefore, they're trying to make us brick ourselves... They'll never kill P2P, they'll never stop everyone from downloading or sharing tracks and the illegality of it is highly irrelevant to most of those who do it. It's only a matter of time before you see P2P applications using encrypted tunnels and then they'll be TOTALLY powerless to do anything about it.
My favourite recently is the FACT advert in the cinemas now where they make the somewhat hilarious statement "Piracy funds terrorism". I bet the big five record labels and the movie studios everything they own that they cannot establish a single piece of evidence in support of such a ludicrous statement!