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I assume that you have a web site for that government agency? While you cannot say you use open source software to save tax money, or even donate to open source projects, what you can do is use open source file formats on your agency web site for when you give out government documents. Save them in OpenOffice.Org and ODF format as well as RTF and MS-Word format, claim you are doing so for "accessibility" to many different types of software. If you have an audio file use MP3 and OGG formats, etc.

Ask your boss about beta testing software, if he says yes you can beta test the many open source projects. You don't need to be a programmer to be a beta tester. Tell your boss you are "evaluating" possible software your agency can use in the future to save money. I am sure he will say yes to that. While you cannot endorse open source software, you can test it.

Write user manuals and documentation for open source software, tell your boss you are writing "training manuals" to make the software better understandable. Use an open source license on the manuals and documentation so that open source organizations can use your words and modify them to make better manuals and user documentation. Write some eBooks in PDF and ODF and RTF format and submit them to Legal Torrents from your home system, not your work system. Wikibooks is another place to write those books in provided you learn HTML codes and Wiki markup. But if you do join, send me a message and I can try to help you out. I have Wiki markup and HTML and XML skills and I am glad to teach it to someone willing to learn or at least find Internet web sites that can help out on that matter.

"Adding hash value is not required for the tracking to start. You can try the service without a membership. However, taking this step prevents other users from flagging the content as copyright infringing, and removing it from the tracker automatically."

from http://www.legaltorrents.com/about/member_self_publishing

Actually, this is not accurate, the trackers are open, and can be used without adding the hash to the website. Unfortunately, a completely open system is open to abuse, copyright infringement, and other issues.

To publish your own content, or content you have a license to distribute, membership is required to "whitelist" content, and prevent automatic removal by blacklisting. This is the solution we have come up with to minimize and prevent abuse.

Any logged in user can flag content as copyright infringing, here
http://www.legaltorrents.com/flag_content
and unless that hash value is in the whitelist (added by a member), the tracker will remove it in about 15 minutes.

http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php

Since when did you need TPB for this kind of sharing. Ain't best place for torrent of sotware on its offical pages? Thou, http://www.legaltorrents.com/ really could use linux / opensource section.

Because they own the rights to the songs, the songs aren't based on a commercial song, and have a different pattern than RIAA songs and also lack a DRM copyprotection scheme.

Legal Torrents

Torrent sites that serve only legal torrents

Michael David Crawford Music unlike any commercial music at all.

Links to tens of thousands of legal free music downloads listed by Michael David Crawford.

See for yourself, some music was meant to be free.

LegalTorrents.com - what you want is in the URL. ;)

LegalTorrents does hosting and distribution of open licensed content:

see http://www.legaltorrents.com/books

Our volunteers just finished a download compilation here:
http://www.legaltorrents.com/torrents/680-california-learning-resource-network-textbooks

All of the textbook except one included a share-friendly license. One Biology book did not, and the content was not included. The Physics texts were published about a year ago.

And just to help you all to do so:

Magnatune.com
Jamendo.com
LegalTorrents.com
Archive.org

If anyone has any other link, feel free to post them as well.

You're not looking hard enough. Wikipedia has also been available in Tomeraider format for a while now.

Indeed. This is the primary reason I have never used Pandora and why I did end up using Last.fm. Pandora has never been accessible to me from where I've been in the world. With Last.fm no longer being free to listen on, options are limited, though, if you continue using scrobbling, you can still use Last.fm to find some decent recommendations to check out. Then you can turn to other sources to sample that music.

Though it isn't the same thing, in that you have no control over what you listen to, I'm going to go ahead and give a shout out to Triple J Radio, a radio station out of Melbourne, Australia that plays a wide range of music and very little top-40 crap.

If anyone is looking for legal free music, it is worth surfing around Archive.org and/or LegalTorrents. There are a lot of good independent artists out there giving their music away.

these folks will: http://beta.legaltorrents.com/about/member_benefits

lifetime membership for $50 until June 22

We offer a service to Content Creators who license digital material with share-friendly licenses (like Creative Commons) and distribute the full quality content. We do not charge Content Creators for this service. We also offer to optionally collect sponsorship for the Content Creator (sent to them by check quarterly), and now (just recently) support external sponsorship links to Paypal, Google Checkout or other services.

see http://beta.legaltorrents.com/

And, to continue the same argument, there's plenty of movies you can download legally via torrents. For example, my own. So to say that this ipso facto abetting piracy is a mistake. My prediction: this decision gets quietly reversed. Now, if only we could get an Azureus version of this app...

There's bt.etree.org, which shares live concert recordings of taper-friendly bands, and which tracks the shifting of petabytes each year. (It is, IMO, a much more useful site if you click on the "hide Grateful Dead and Phish" button at the bottom of the page, but opinions may vary.) There's also legaltorrents.com which specializes in creative-commons media. Neither one is going to have as much mainstream material as the illegal sites (that should go without saying), but etree, at least, has some fairly big names, e.g. Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Buckethead, JJ Cale, Los Lobos, Primus.

If you want to be popular, make yourself notable AND easy to get.

I concur. Now, onwards to shameless self promotion! Or rather, I don't know if I'm notable, but "easy to get" seems accurate. :P

You can download my first feature off of LegalTorrents: Seven Dead Men.

Hope you enjoy.

The beauty of share-friendly licenses is that in every case the license provisions allow for verbatim copies. Other restrictions and rights may exist, but at a minimum you are allowed to keep and share a copy of the information.

So no, as long as you can use the information how you want, you do not need an expensive mobile data plan. Get a cheap USB stick or a flash drive+headphones (an ipod) and play away!

More specifically, this uaradio.net content is CC by-nc-nd/3.0
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/390-the-best-of-indie-rock-vol-1
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/393-the-best-of-indie-pop-vol-1
plus lots more on thier site.

The beauty of share-friendly licenses is that in every case the license provisions allow for verbatim copies. Other restrictions and rights may exist, but at a minimum you are allowed to keep and share a copy of the information.

So no, as long as you can use the information how you want, you do not need an expensive mobile data plan. Get a cheap USB stick or a flash drive+headphones (an ipod) and play away!

More specifically, this uaradio.net content is CC by-nc-nd/3.0
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/390-the-best-of-indie-rock-vol-1
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/393-the-best-of-indie-pop-vol-1
plus lots more on thier site.

I only see *large, traditional* music in decline, and organizations built on the assumption those organizations are the only ones with talent - but not the "industry". Such is the effect of rapid change.

See collections, for example:
http://www.jamendo.com/en/
http://bt.etree.org/
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/netlabel-music
http://uaradio.net/

and others, going strong and growing

plus *lots* of great, independent net labels and organizations building up to use the Internet the way it works, and an emerging set of well-known artists breaking free from these old organizations to embrace new methods.

TPB is just a forum where people post links.

So is Legaltorrents. Hrm, I wonder why TPB is on trial and Legaltorrents is not...

We're working on the assumption that Title 17 USC 105 applies to these works as results of official duties of an officer or employee of the United States Government, which would make the videos produced public domain content.

We have volunteers posting them onto Bittorrent now:
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/creators/101-changegov

and notifications go out onto Twitter, Facebook, and onto custom RSS and email feeds to our members on LegalTorrents

We're also hosting this on LegalTorrents here
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/255-weekly-address-nov-15-2008

I have had a really good experience via LegalTorrents.com. I released my feature-length film there and they're different in that you upload your content TO THEM and they seed it for you, in addition to letting it get seeded by the public.

The response by the community has been quite positive, and I find that I get several new downloads every day (and since I released two versions, 700MB and 3.4 GB, I think that number is pretty good). Almost 500 downloads in a little over a month! Accordingly, I find that a lot diversity in the country of origin for the downloaders, as I'm getting a good spread across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, as well as the Americas.

Good luck on finding a good place to host your streaming content, but if you're in the mood to release your work in downloadable-form under something like a Creative Commons license, I would certainly recommend LegalTorrents.com...

[Note: I don't work there--just an extremely happy user. I heard of them off of /., actually]

It seems like their "Animations" section might be a bit lacking, so you might have some luck! Send them an email:

http://beta.legaltorrents.com/animations

And there is another issue too: Who is going to write these open source textbooks?

Here is a series of high quality physics textbooks we host, written by Ben Crowell:
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/158-physics-textbooks

There are 8 complete texts, adopted for classes by over 20 Colleges and Universities, and as many or more high schools.

[Overt Plug]
We would love to host other textbooks if the Content Creator wants them distributed too...
[/Plug]

Well I have never seen P2P used for anything legitimate.

http://beta.legaltorrents.com/

I remember downloading things from LegalTorrents a while back (at least one year).

If you go to http://beta.legaltorrents.com/, you'll see a lot of items listed with a date. I claim that this is the date the item was uploaded.

It's clearly not the date the item was published; for instance, if you go to http://orange.blender.org/, you'll learn that "Elephants Dream will be shown on the German TV channel 3sat, apparently right about now, 13 August 2006." Note that the elephants dream is tagged with the date of may 11th, 2008.

Note also that Free Culture is date to 2004.

Submitter is wrong, summary is right; "a while now" is probably four years, as I suspect Lawrence Lessig had a guiding hand in the making of LegalTorrents. Also, no works earlier than 2004 could be found be me.

I don't know anything about this website, but it was the first google result when I typed in "legal torrents". Apparently they're revamping their site to allow for compensation directly to artists. Not sure if it's voluntary or not like Radiohead. Legal Torrents I would hope there is some kind of Netflix like rating system to filter out all the crappy bands that all they do is cover Lynard Skynard.

LegalTorrents, pushing in the same direction, is conducting a private beta now and will launch an open site soon.

Mod the parent up. This is exactly what I wanted to say. Archive.org's Netlabel section is a great place to find new music for free from artists just giving it away (or at least giving some away to try to convince you to buy their other stuff). Also, I'd like to throw in LegalTorrents.com, where you can download archives of Netlabel stuff and get a lot of it at once. I recommend Observatory Online, One, and Kikapu, if you are into more melodic electronica.

Also many Free and Open Source software projects distribute installers via BitTorrent, notably Ubuntu Linux and OpenOffice.org.

All of these torrents are completely legal. Yet many ISPs block BitTorrent traffic - that happened to me with Eastlink back in Nova Scotia. I was therefore unable to check that my own torrents were operating properly! One can try to work around such blockage by using non-standard port numbers, but I understand that it's possible for ISPs to filter based on the content of packets, and not just the port numbers.

I can see the day coming when all peer-to-peer traffic, whether legal or not, is blocked either due to new laws or record and movie industry lawsuits. All of us who have free content and software to distribute will lose out.

Those of us who offer legal files via peer-to-peer networks - not just BitTorrent, as Jamendo also offers eMule - need to work together to lobby both national governments and local ISPs to do away with this filtering. There are many ways to download both music and software that are perfectly legal; we need to dispel the myth that free downloads are somehow necessarily violating the law.

Check http://www.legaltorrents.com/ - legal files distributed via Bittorrent.

But since you mentioned software, check http://www.planeshift.it/ - an open source game distributed via Bittorrent.

Should I just give up on music?

"It appears to me that they are doing everything that they can to keep BitTorrent as legitimate as possible in the eyes of the public..."

No, sites like LegalTorrents and even BitTorrent.com itself are "doing everything they can." ISOHunt puts absolutely no effort into maintaining legitimacy; when you visit a tracker site and see that the top stuff mirrors the top ten movies, CDs and games, it's pretty clear that the owners care not one whit about being "legitimate." Plus, the name "ISOHunt" is a pretty poor choice if you're trying to specialize in legal torrents.

If they had wanted to create a tracker for "legimate" content, they could have. Others have. But there's very little money in that business model. There's money in piracy, so that's the direction they chose.

"The point is IsoHunt is purely a medium which people could search out torrents. The purpose was to make a library of legit legal torrents that people have created."

The first clue that the above is bullshit is the site's title. "legit, legal" torrents are seldom distributed as ISOs. If you're thinking that it refers to Linux ISOs, think again -- there's already a site specializing in "legit, legal" torrents. Notice that there are few if any ISOs to be had there, and no Linux distros.

Listen, I understand why the owners of ISOHunt think they need to keep chanting the "legitimate" line; it's to build a case that they didn't have intent. But we don't need to be their stooges. We know exactly why ISOHunt was there. Let's not kid ourselves.

"What we don't understand is the point of law that he used to justify his ruling. What we don't understand is how we are protected from this kind of charge when we are not trying to do anything related to music."

I don't understand the first part, either, since I'm not familiar with Australian law. But I can offer some advice on the second.

Due to the nature of their profession, many people who read Slashdot have trouble coming to terms with the fact that the law is often rather soft and mushy. We works with ones and zeros in our own profession, and it makes much more sense to us if something can be declared to be either illegal or not illegal. In many cases it is indeed quite clear, but in civil law, it's often not. And that is precisely the reason why we have courts.

To get to your point -- say you're thinking of starting a web site and you want to protect yourself from civil liability. You can start by asking yourself these questions:

1. "Am I possibly infringing on somebody else's copyright in a way to which they would object?"
2. "Is providing access to copyrighted content in an unauthorized manner a possible use for my site, or the primary use?"
3. "If I were to ask the copyright holder for permission, would they likely give it? Would my web site's business model still be valid if it relied on getting permission?"
4. "If my web site has user-submitted content, am I building in the proper technical controls so that I can remove content if presented with a DMCA takedown request?"

And if you're particularly cynical, you can ask yourself:

1. "If I'm infringing on somebody else's copyright or allowing my users to do the same, do I have plausible deniability if I am accused of this?"

So, a site like, say, legaltorrents would pass the test, as would, say, a book review site which posted excerpts of text for critical purposes and provided links to where the user could purchase the book. Google would pass, as well. But mp3sforfree.com, as it was operated by the fellow in TFA, would not... he failed on all five points.

please note that all of the current torrents are made available under a Creative Commons license with the full permission of the rights holder.

"If big labels lowered their CD prices, their sales would ramp up and more people would be interested in their artists shows. It's called Loss leader."

Record companies get 99% of their revenue from the sale of records, so selling at a loss is not an option. As it is, many record companies end up with net margins of less than 20% (I believe the Canadian recording industry as a whole barely hit 10% last year) so they don't have a lot of room to play with on pricing, either. This will be wholly misunderstood by those who don't get the difference between gross margin and net margin, but it is correct. However, things might be totally different in Brazil.

"Moreover, I refuse to see how can one music piracy is related to software piracy after all. When you need software, you can (mostly) always set for a free/open version. When you want music (aka culture), there is no such option."

Curse those greedy musicians for refusing to let their recordings be freely distributed!

Seriously, though, there are lots of options. That old standby, radio (both terrestrial and streaming) is still a viable choice. If you want free MP3s, there's legaltorrents, and mp3.com and garageband.com have free downloads. Those are just aggregators -- many indie and unsigned artists release tracks on their web sites or via the P2P networks. MySpace and a few of the social networking sites have lots of bands online that will allow you to stream or download their stuff. But, I understand that as a Brazilian, you might be required by law to only use Orkut.

If anybody's unsure as to why it's often easier to find good open source software than it is to find good free music, it's important to understand that it's typically easier on an order of magnatude to contribute to an open source project than it is to rent a studio (or build your own), engineer and produce your own music. I've contributed to open source projects just by using my $500 Mac Mini and a few hours of my time. By comparison, a decent studio and engineer might cost you $500 a day. However, this fact does not make music piracy "different" than software piracy. We should respect others' rights, whether their tool of choice is a QWERTY keyboard or a Roland keyboard.

talk about what's really at issue, which is brand new, current, and popular music and movies?

It's not that hard. In afternoon you can obtain 20-30 CDs' worth of music. Give it a listen. Any of it that floats your boat, let someone know.

Nothing would please the free culture movement more than to see "piracy" and RIAA record sales both plummet to zero. Now.

http://www.legaltorrents.com/index.htm

Legal Torrents.
Note that you could have used Google for that one. :)

And if you want to call SXSW a community, here is a link to their free MP3 archive torrent for 2006. There's a 2005 you can Google for, too.

Legal Torrents is quite good. Creative Commons-licensed music, movies, books, and such.

http://www.legaltorrents.com

ETree - Legal Bootleg Torrents

Open Source Torrents

It seems I have understood the article/news release in a very different way and it didn't seem as "spyware" "sellout" etc. to me.

Read.

BTW, I am not a "fan" of the product, I use official bittorrent for OS X to download couple of stuff I see at http://legaltorrents.com/ occasionally.

http://www.legaltorrents.com/index.htm

Do they have applied a discount for all the P2P users getting legit content from :

http://www.jamendo.com/
or
http://www.archive.org/audio/collection.php?collec tion=opensource_audio
or
http://www.legaltorrents.com/
or
http://bt.etree.org/
or
http://torrents.gentoo.org/
or
http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
or ....

See a list of legitimate content at the end of this page :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

turn their own weapon against them.

It seems kind of stupid to try to get Them(tm) to break the law while trying to catch you (in general, not timmarhy personally) break the law, doesn't it? If you have a problem with the business and legal practices of the **AAs (or similar associations depending on your country) then the easiest way to deal with them is to not deal with them at all and not use their products.

Rather than turning their weapons against them, don't give them a reason to use their weapons. Go for the legal stuff. IMHO it tends to be very good anyway. Here is a good place to start:
LegalTorrents.com

*coughshamelessplugcough*

It's called "Go Open" and was produced in South Africa.

You can download the first two seasons for free at:

http://www.legaltorrents.com/

Actually, I'm a fan of listening to lugradio on my drive to work. If not that I usually just randomly switch through the Podcast Directory.
A couple more to wet your tongue would be to dig through archive and legal torrents.
Alternatively, I know you said you wish to save a bit of dough by doing it the freebie way, but I've gotta tell you Sirius is one hell of an offering.