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Where Are The Legal MP3s?
kwhite asks: "Unlike many of the /. community I have not made the jump to Naptser, Gnutella, etc. due to the belief that I think it is wrong. I was just curious to know of what 'legal' websites there are out there that give away MP3's or some other kind of compressed music format. The only good site I have found so far is downloadsdirect.com. This site has a lot of free downloads, and others that allow you to pay by song. Just curious as to know whether anyone else has found any other good sites out there?" There is, of course, the ever popular MP3.Com but are there other sites out there that legally distribute MP3s? Do others feel as I do that the RIAA should have answered this question a long time ago? (Especially considering the fuss they've made about Napster.)
The law reserves to the copyright holder pretty much any type of action that makes money. You can't rip mp3's and sell them. But the kind of massive, uncompensated copying that napster and gnutella make easy is not restricted.
This applies to copyrighted software as well. You can make copies of commercial software and give them to your friends, or use them on machines at home, as long as you aren't using them to do consulting work or stuff for your employer or anything besides enthusiast/hobbiest type stuff.
The big software copyright holders had a very successful propaganda campaign to convience people otherwise. Remember all those "Just Say No to Software Piracy!" posters in school computer labs back in the late 80s and early 90s ? There were ads in magazines and even on TV as well. But Microsoft and the enforcers they funded were too smart to ever take anyone to court for giving away software; the court cases were all legitimate cases of people copying and selling, or using a copied version in a company or other commercial enterprise. ( Ok, there are a few cases in which someone running a server with commercial software on it was legally harassed just to shut it down; usually after running them out of legal fees, some secrete out-of-court settlement would be agreed upon. ) This adertising and propaganda campaign resulted in enormous numbers of people like you buying software that they didn't need to. Ponzi had nothing on these guys; immagine the amount of money involved here.
So the RIAA and MPAA are going for the same move. And thanks to dupes like you, it's working. We probably live in the age with the most unfettered access to and desimination of information ever. The fact that you can download the law in question off of the web and read it for yourself is amazing. But you didn't do it, you just used the internet to parrot your enemies' propaganda. Hey, I got an idea -- why don't you go tell every one to send ME ten bucks ? And when am I getting a check from you ? Cause that's what I'm charging to read this message, and you little post-pirate! Feel guilty and send me a check!
Ok, back to serious mode. When you download that thing, the fair use section is going to be very vague and loose. (It definitely includes napsterizing mp3's though.) This is why:
Congress wanted to give the copyright holders the ability to profit from their work beyound the first sale. So they gave them the right to be the only one's to sell it. But they said that you had to really sell it, you couldn't license it for a particular purpose. (Of course that is exactly what the RIAA and friends want to do -- they'll sell you a copy for each position of the volume knob, or make you pay each time you play it, if they can.) The reasons for that, from Congress's point of view, are probably well thought out and pretty clever. The whole copyright structure is pretty much self-administering, in that the remedies for breaking the rules are usually enforced by the copyright holder in a suit, so we don't need to have the BATF of copyrights soaking up the budget, and copyrights which aren't worth anything are not enforced. If we start allowing use-based control, then we get away from that lean, efficient self-administering system, because we have to support a lot of monitoring of people, a lot more legal actions, etc. Remember, Congress is allowed to give away our rights to copy things only for the "advancement of the Arts and Sciences", and a use-based control system would probably retard things as much as it encouraged people to make more music or whatever.
So that's why you have the fair use exemption. So why didn't Congress spell it out and take away all this uncertainty ? Well, if you think about it, it is pretty hard to do. If you make an itemized list of fair use activities, then the big copyright businesses will invent some medium or method of distribution so that you pay for something, and then have to pay again to use it. If you make an itemized list of things a copyright holder can charge for, some new technology will present a new medium which can't benefit from the copyright system (and the copyright system is a very beneficial setup, over all), and this new medium will languish until congress notices it and adds it to the list. Obviously, it is better to use the gray words "fair use", simply saying that you can use what you buy, and let the courts sort out the details as they arise. And then you get some dinosaur-brain like Kaplan, but hey, no system is perfect.
So stop worrying about legal mp3s. I don't think you could find someone charging for mp3's, other than the legitimate artist or publisher, if you had to to save your Mom's life. I have other good news also. That guy named Lars who said you have to come over to his house and clean his toilet ? You only have to do that if you want to be his serf. The same goes for taking out Jack Valenti's garbage tonight. But if you just feel less morally anguished by being a slave, go ahead.