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From Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads:

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Besides giving you lots of links to legal downloads, the article goes on to discuss how you can change the law to make p2p filesharing of proprietary files legal. I think that could happen if I could get all sixty million US file traders to read the article in time for the November 2004 elections. So far the article is getting read by about 500 people a day, but it needs to be read a couple of orders of magnitude more often between now and November if it's going to effect the election. Please read What You Can Do To Help.

Please copy and distribute this article. It has a Creative Commons license.

From the introduction to Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads:

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

The article has a Creative Commons license. Please copy and distribute it.

If you're a musician who offers free, legal downloads of your music, I will link your band's website from the article, at no cost to you other than the work it will take you to give the article a reciprocal link from anywhere on your website. To get your link, please follow the instructions in the Links to Individual Artists section carefully.

Thank you for your attention.

You don't need to spend your hard-earned cash at the iTunes store, or get into trouble with the RIAA if you read:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

It has been Google's #1 hit for the query legal music downloads for three months, and has had 14872 hits so far this month.

It has a Creative Commons license. You are encouraged to copy it.

A Romanian translation will be posted soon, kindly provided by Ciprian Mihet. I am actively seeking translations to other languages.

Here's the introduction:

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Please read my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads. It is under a Creative Commons license - please copy and distribute it. I'm also asking for translations; a Romanian translation will be posted as soon as I'm done converting the translator's word document to XHTML.

From the introduction:

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

The article discusses at some length how you can work to make file sharing legal.

It has been Google's #1 hit for the query legal music downloads for about three months now, and recently has been on the second page of hits recently for the much more popular query music downloads.

Traffic to the article has been climbing steadily, especially since the RIAA lawsuits were filed. It's looking like my copy of the article will get about 19,000 page views this month.

Now on the front page at Kuro5hin, my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Please copy and distribute it according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.

Thank you for your attention.

On the front page today at Kuro5hin: my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

The article is under a Creative Commons license. Please copy and distribute it. The copy on my website has particularly simple markup to enable easier copying.

You can avoid getting sued or arrested if you download legal music instead of violating copyright with p2p apps. Many independent and unsigned musicians provide free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves, for example my friends the Divine Maggees.

There are peer to peer networks for the sharing of legal music. In some cases they use digital signatures to ensure the files are legit. Here's the ones I've found so far:

• Furthur Network
• konspire[2b]
• Monotonik's BitTorrents - zip files with ~300 MB of MP3s

If you know of any others please let me know.

You can avoid getting sued or arrested if you download legal music instead of violating copyright with p2p apps. Many independent and unsigned musicians provide free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves, for example my friends the Divine Maggees.

There are peer to peer networks for the sharing of legal music. In some cases they use digital signatures to ensure the files are legit. Here's the ones I've found so far:

• Furthur Network
• konspire[2b]
• Monotonik's BitTorrents - zip files with ~300 MB of MP3s

If you know of any others please let me know.

You can avoid being sued or arrested if you download legal music instead of getting your tunes from the p2p networks.

Many unsigned musicians provide free downloads of their music on their websites as a way to attract more fans, for example my friends the Divine Maggees. Many such musicians, while relatively unknown, are as good as any major label band and certainly an improvement over the pablum they serve up on ClearChannel.

You can find many more examples in my new article:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

The article also explores some of the historical and legal issues behind copyright, and suggests steps the file traders can take to make file sharing legal.

If you're a musician who offers downloads of your music, I can link to your band's website from the article. Please follow the instructions given here.

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the RIAA or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many indie (unsigned) musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans - here's mine and my friends The Divine Maggees.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs from indie bands, and seeing their shows, instead of enriching the major labels every time you buy a Britney or New Kids CD. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads are not copyright violations because the artists give you permission to download them.

Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com . See especially their genre index . Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.

Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet ?

The Open Directory Project has Bands and Artists and Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.

There are better sites for hosting MP3s than MP3.com. Some of them allow you to buy the band's CD from the same page as the MP3 download. Among them are The Internet Underground Music Archives, CDBaby, Epitonic.com, Lulu, SoundClick, Matador Records and insound .

Monotonik provides BitTorrents with zip files containing 60 to 100 MP3s apiece available here.

If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites here . Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.

There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See Furthur Network and konspire[2b] .

Unfortunately, musicians are often not very good website designers, so poor usability is a significant obstacle to getting music directly from artists' websites. If you're a musician, and you'd like to know how you can improve your website so more people will download your music, please read my article If Indie Musicians Wanted Their Music Heard....

Finally, there is the problem of finding the music that's actually worth listening to. 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, which you'll find at

I take issue with the statement in the post:

We all want 'big books'

My experience has overwhelmingly been that big computer books are a poor investment. I guess big books sell better, which is why one sees so many in the bookstores, but I have learned to skip over them and look for the little books.

Why?

Big computer books are often filled with fluff, such as large illustrations, fancy typography or sidebars that don't add much meat.

What is really worse is that it takes a lot more work for a writer to explain a complex point concisely. I imagine it also takes more works for the editors to cut down on material that doesn't really add value to the book. My experience is that the big computer books are often poorly written.

Also, I don't have enough time to read all the technical books. It simply takes less time to read a compact, well-written book than a big, verbose tome. There's also the problem of fitting a bunch of big computer books on my limited bookshelf space.

I have observed that there seem to be an awful lot of big books for windows & web programming, and Java programming. The situation seems quite a bit better for C++ programming, with such slim books as Scott Meyers' "Effective C++".

There are long books which are worthwhile, but the ones that are both big and good are covering a topic that is very broad and detailed, for example Foley, Van Dam, Feiner and Hughes' "Computer Graphics".

My wife wanted to learn to use cascading stylesheets for her web design. The bookstore had two books, a small one by O'Reilly and a much larger one that seemed to cover the same material but had lots of fancy typography and illustrations and verbose text. In the end she chose the O'Reilly book, and after using it to design a website for some friends of ours she said she was very glad to have gotten the O'Reilly book.

Finally, I'd like to suggest that before you purchase a new technical book, check to see if there is a review of it at the Association of C and C++ Users book reviews section.