RIAA Tracking Songs by MD5 Hashes

aSiTiC writes "Apparently RIAA has obtained some technical experts in their prosecution of file swappers. Currently they are tracking traded mp3 files from the Napster network by matching MD5 hashes. This seems quite interesting but I was under the assumption that identical hashes could be created with identical rips and id3v2 tagging. Now may be the time to update your illegal mp3 file MD5 hash sums."

Comments

gee?

[Comsn]

The RIAA, the trade group for the largest record labels, said it also found other hidden evidence inside the woman's music files suggesting the songs were recorded by other people and distributed across the Internet.

ya think? and here i thought it was the magical mp3 fairy who put mp3s on my hd...

Re:gee?

[squiggleslash]

To put this in context, the RIAA was responding to the impression "Jane Doe" gave that the MP3s were rips of her own CDs:

The disclosures were included in court papers filed against a Brooklyn woman fighting efforts to identify her for allegedly sharing nearly 1,000 songs over the Internet. The recording industry disputed her defense that songs on her family's computer were from compact discs she had legally purchased.

Of course, the wording of the latter is ambiguous - it could mean nycfashiongirl meant she had downloaded MP3s of pieces of music that were also on CDs in her possession. A lot of amateur lawyers on Slashdot (ahem) claim this is fair use, and given it's non-commercial and wouldn't have an impact on the ability of the artist to make a sale, that may well be true.

(This wouldn't, though, be a defense for the central problem that she made all of these MP3s available for download by millions of anonymous strangers without the consent of the copyright holders. And assuming her identity is revealed and she is sued, if the "ambiguous" claim's alternative interpretation is correct, she'll be able to show the CDs to the Judge.)

Re:gee?

[laird]

It's true that two different people could generate RIP's of the same track with the same MD5 hash, but the odds are low: they'd have to use exactly the same encoding settings, and enter exactly the same ID3 tags with exactly the same values. (Counterpoints: they could be default settings, and CDDB/Gracenote metadata, which would improve the odds a bit) And since we're talking about large music collections, the exact matching would have to have to happen across hundreds of tracks. And if the ID3 tags had notes like "ripped by so-and-so" that'd kinda blow the case. So while it's certainly true that MD5 hashes don't completely uniquely identify a particular RIP of a track, I think that when compared for large numbers of files, it'd be a pretty good indicator of file copying.

Re:gee?

[nearlygod]

About this interpretation of Fair Use: I agree that downloading mp3's of CDs that you have purchased should be fair use. I am in a similar situation. A couple of years ago I lost 90% of my CD collection in an apartment fire. I had about 20 of these CDs ripped at the time and since then, I have downloaded many of the others to replace what I had paid for. In some cases, I re-purchased the CD because I wanted to have an original for some of my favorite artists but I didn't mind the mp3 mastered replacements for many of the CDs. Would this fall under Fair Use? I would think that it does since the RIAA seems to think that we are only purchasing a license to listen to the music. However, if I had to present the original CDs to a judge to prove that I do/did own the physical CD, I would be SOL.

Re:gee?

[Anonym0us Cow Herd]

It would still be possible for her to have music with an md5 hash the same as a file on the Napster network. If they were ripped with the same encoder/bitrate/id3 tag as the Napster version, it's possible for md5 to be the same.

It is also possible that, as someone else suggested, the magical mp3 fairy left those files behind on her hard drive. In fact, I would propose that the mp3 fairy theory is even more likely.

The only way that the MD5 hashes could be identical is if the two files are absolutely identical in every single bit.

It is not possible (okay, unlikely, but unlikely enough for me to say not possible) to have two different files with the same MD5 hash. And definitely not likely by accident.

If even one single bit of the file is changed, then approximately 50 % of the bits of the MD5 hash will change. What cryptographers call "good diffusion properties". Good enough to trust for digital signatures, secrets, etc. You sign the MD5 hash of a document, because nobody else will have a document with the same hash.



To preempt one of the inevitible replies let me state: yes I know that you could have two different files, in theory that have the same MD5 hash. After all the files are much larger than the MD5 hash of 128 bits. Multiple files hash to the same value.

But the whole point of the design of MD5 is such that you can never create or discover any two such different files that hash to the same value.

If you were to examine 2^127 different files, then you would have a 50% chance of one of them giving you the desired MD5 hash. Do you know how large 2^127 is?

I would say that there is better than a 2^127 chance that the mp3's were left behind by the magical mp3 fairy.

Re:gee?

[arth1]

This wouldn't, though, be a defense for the central problem that she made all of these MP3s available for download by millions of anonymous strangers without the consent of the copyright holders.

Unless she had an OC-48 or two going into her home, she didn't make the files available for download by *millions* of strangers. When the resource is limited, the magnitude of the crime is likewise limited. If you offer a stolen watch on the streets of New York, you can't be charged with trying to sell it to MILLIONS of people, cause there's only one watch. Likewise, in this case there's only enough bandwidth for a certain number of potential downloads, and speaking of millions here is plain misleading.
If the people who downloaded files from her spread them further, that's THEIR crime and not hers, much as the guy who sold a stolen watch won't be found guilty for the watch buyer illegaly selling it to someone else.

And in this case, it's even less severe, as it's not a theft, but a copyright violation.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:gee?

[gozar]

This is pretty common at least with iTunes. Most of the people will not change the default settings, so each cd rip will be identical, all using the same id3 tags.

Re:gee?

[3terrabyte]

Excellent point. The "magic number" system the RIAA uses is astounding. 52X burners count as 3 cd burners? $750 to $150,000 damages PER song is crazy.

I thought I remembered seeing something about how you have to have a certain $$ amount before getting a felony. $2000? ANyway, they then said each song was worth about $200. I think it was something like $20 per song, times 10 people. 10 people being the gestimate of people you magically distributed it to, because obviously more than one person can download a song from you. Anyway, 10 songs and you're a felon.

Anyway, these numbers don't add up. The RIAA likes to paint a screen of terror by saying that your one song you shared, can then be shared exponentially after that. Sure, it's true. You share it to 2 people. They share it to 2. By the end of the day, 1,000,000 people have it. But why would you be responsible for the 2nd thru 20th level of distribution? You only gave it to 2 people. And if it's "worth" $1 on iTunes, why isn't the damage $1 per song per download?

It's this magic number system the RIAA counts by that causes them to sue 4 students for 47 billion dollars. It would have taken the RIAA 5 years of GROSS profits to hit 47 billion dollars. How can a search engine running for a couple months on a campus amount to 5 years of GROSS profits?? It doesn't...make...sense.. you must acquit.

Re:gee?

[AJWM]

I have some doubts about the ripping process being as exact as you say.

So did I, so I just ran the experiment:

al% cdparanoia -d /dev/hdd 1 pf.wav
cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty <monty@xiph.org> and Xiphophorus

Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

Ripping from sector 0 (track 1 [0:00.00])
to sector 17511 (track 1 [3:53.36])

outputting to pf.wav
(--stuff omitted due to lameness filter--)

al% cdparanoia -d /dev/hdd 1 pf2.wav
cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty <monty@xiph.org> and Xiphophorus

Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

Ripping from sector 0 (track 1 [0:00.00])
to sector 17511 (track 1 [3:53.36])

outputting to pf2.wav

(-- stuff omitted due to lameness filter--)

al% md5sum pf*wav
fd8ddaf41fd482a6aa1a492915a3e788 pf.wav
fd8ddaf41fd482a6aa1a492915a3e788 pf2.wav
al%

Looks like under identical conditions (same drive) it'll rip consistently. Ripping off a different drive might give different results, that's more hassle than I want to try right now. If anyone wants to compare, the disc/track I ripped is Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Capitol's catalog # CDP 7 46001 2, DIDX 226. (Different recordings will almost certainly give different results.)

Oh, and to make RIAA happy:

al% rm pf*wav
al%

;-)

Re:gee?

[Zigg]

Different drives, with the same disc, and identical software, certainly do give different results. Just tested. Identical versions of cdparanoia live on both systems.

I also ran lame with default settings (makes a 128K CBR) on both WAVs and got different sums there as well.

No tags involved.

What if...

[moehoward]

What if I own the CD but got files off the Internet because I was too lazy to rip them? Would I still be expecting to be sent to the prison camp?

In other news, all songs produced by RIAA artists in the last 10 years all have the same MD5 hash anyway, because they're all the same.

Re:What if...

[DrEldarion]

Yes, because for them to know that you have the MP3s, you have to be sharing them, which is the illegal part.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

What happen if

[Anonymous Coward]

you just normalize or edit the begining or the end of the song? Does the MD5 Hashes still works?

Re:What happen if

[l1gunman]

Any modification, to ANY bit of the file covered by the hash, will change the MD5 hash (that's how hashes work). If you assume the hash includes the ID3 tag info, then simply editing the info (putting something in the notes field, for example) would change the hash.

On the other hand, if I were the RIAA attempting to identify common files in this way, I might be inclined to exclude the ID3 tag from the MD5 computation since it is so easily modified.

Any changes to the actual content, though, will ripple into the MD5 computation.

Short answer: "normalizing" the file for volume, or even chopping off a few seconds of trailing silence with something like CoolEdit will certainly change the hash and make it distinct from whatever their baseline hash value is.

Re:What happen if

[1u3hr]

Short answer: "normalizing" the file for volume, or even chopping off a few seconds of trailing silence with something like CoolEdit will certainly change the hash

If that's all you want to do, much better not to use Cooledit, which has to expand and recompress the file to MP3. Use something like MP3Trim which can chop off any given number of MP3 frames, or normalise the volume, by operating on the MP3 directly. Much much faster, and no expand/recompress quality loss.

MD5 Cannot stand up in court.

[Organized Konfusion]

The md5 hashing algorithm has been proven to contain flaws allowing two files to produce identical md5 sums.

Re:MD5 Cannot stand up in court.

[Urkki]

A bit of clarification is in order I think.

First of all it's very clear that two files can give same MD5 checksums. After all, MD5 is only 16 bytes (2^128 different possible). So if you have just 17 byte files (2^136 different possible), it's clear that on average every MD5 sum matches to 256 of all possible files.

It's just damn unlikely to get 2 files with same MD5, and if you wanted to brute force it, you would have to try average 2^64 different files before you found one with identical MD5 to another file. And this would take a long time (actually not that terribly long, a few years at most, and it parallelizes perfectly).

The page you link to implies that it's possible to "easily" fabricate a file that produces a given check sum, so instead of months of processing time, only days or hours would be needed to get a MD5 hash collision.

So all P2P users / software makers need to do to circumvent this, is to agree on a specific MD5 sum, then patch every file so that they produce this same MD5 sum :)

Of course the obivious solution for RIAA would be to use a more secure hash algorithm, with more bits. Unbroken algorithm with enough bits can't be faked, as it would take more than age of the universe to brute force it.

Though the basic problem with this RIAA method remains. If you rip with same software from identical CD digitally, and there are not bit errors at ay point, then you should end up with identical file, and therefore identical hash no matter how secure the algorithm is...

Re:MD5 Cannot stand up in court.

[Mechanik]

So all P2P users / software makers need to do to circumvent this, is to agree on a specific MD5 sum, then patch every file so that they produce this same MD5 sum :)

That would totally pooch clients such as E-Donkey that use MD5 hashes to actually figure out which clients have a particular file (whether just a portion thereof, or in their entirety), irrespective of how each individual client may have renamed it.

And trust me, there are fringe benefits to the hashing as well, such as making it apparent when someone is trying to masquerade a file as something that it's really not.

E.g., consider the following scenario...

1. You are searching for Red Hat ISOs.

2. You find a match called "Red Hat.iso" shared from one user.

3. You notice that there are 50 other users sharing the same file.

3. The other 50 versions are named as "Goatse.cx guy and tubgirl together at last.mpg"

4. Therefore, something is very very rotten in Denmark... :-)


Mechanik

MD5 Hash

[fruey]

This seems quite interesting but I was under the assumption that identical hashes could be created with identical rips and id3v2 tagging.

The only way for two files to have the same MD5 hash is for them to both be encoded with the same encoder, from the same WAV file, with the same bitrate and all advanced options, and to have exactly the same ID3 information, the same filesize, and to be identical to the last bit.

Otherwise, the MD5 will be nothing like the same, for two perfectly identical songs where one has a spelling error in one field of the ID3 tag. I imagine for any one song, there are many many different MD5sums out there, although perhaps one or another good quality version would exists on hundreds of different PCs...

Re:MD5 Hash

[kzinti]

The only way for two files to have the same MD5 hash is for them to both be encoded with the same encoder, from the same WAV file, with the same bitrate and all advanced options, and to have exactly the same ID3 information, the same filesize, and to be identical to the last bit.

If two people used the same ripping software set to all its default settings (as many unsophisticated users do), got a perfect rip off the CD, and relied on CDDB information for tagging the song, then it's possible that they got mp3s identical down to the last bit, and thus identical MD5 hashes. BUT to make this a plausible defense, you'd have to show that your rip was in fact perfect. In other words you'd have to be able to recreate the mp3 independently. If the old Napster mp3 had any ripping errors, then it would be hard to claim that the later rip just happened to have the same errors - assuming errors are essentially random.

but will they target aol/tw?

[Comsn]

The RIAA has said it expects to file at least several hundred lawsuits seeking financial damages as early as next month. U.S. copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song offered illegally on a person's computer, but the RIAA has said it would be open to settlement proposals from defendants.

will they start sending subpeonas to aol/tw customers this time?

Md5 hashes are also used for....

[shione]

hmm Isn't that how k-sig, built into Kazaa Lite K++, works, by tracking MD5 hashes so ppl get exactly the file they want.

Changing MD5 hashes on songs to avoid RIAA would also lessen the effectiveness of K-SIG. Trading hashes of know working files was one of the ways ppl on P2p avoided downloading those fake RIAA files.

Job opportunities

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Apparently RIAA has obtained some technical experts in their prosecution of file swappers. Currently they are tracking traded mp3 files from the Napster network by matching MD5 hashes

After all, in these dot-bust days, it's still possible to get a nice highly paid job and be called an expert by putting the right spin to strcmp() in your resume ...

hashes are kinda pointless

[truffle]

It is generally believed amongst file traders that it is legal to download an mp3 for a song, when you own the CD. In other words, you don't need to rip and encode songs from your own CD. However, this may not be true (I am not a lawyer).

The RIAA is using MD5 hashes as a basis for proof that the individual in question downloaded the files they are sharing, instead of ripping them from their own CD collection. This is supposed to show the individual is a willing participant in stealing and distributing music, instead of someone who is just sharing what they already own. But, see above.

I think this is mostly just a FUD tactic. They can talk to the media about how their MD5 hashes prove so-and-so is a big mean pirate hacker. MD5 hash certainly sounds scary, especially when the technology is described by the media as a tool used by hackers.

Pity the RIAA

[heironymouscoward]

They are really fighting a losing battle.

Exchanging music is not about piracy, it is about exchanging culture, just like when my grandfather leant me some old Jazz records and said, "here, you might like this".

Today culture moves at the speed of light and the RIAA believes it has the right to tax this movement. It cannot succeed except by destroying the Internet.

I'm starting to believe, watching this debate evolve over many years, that the file traders are right, for the wrong reasons.

Human culture depends on exchange of ideas and information, and music and films are a large part of this in today's world. No album, no movie scene, no written text is a personal creation, they are all taken from the pool of common culture, modified, and redistributed.

Seeking all means to do this faster than ever - and ignoring the barriers, such as "ownership", that stand in the way - is the prerrogative of today's world. We simply can't put the genie back into the bottle and start exchanging pieces of paper and vinyl discs again.

The debate is huge, but the results already seem clear: any laws designed to stop the process from continuing will be further and further ignored until they are seen by a majority of people to be useless vestiges of a material-obsessed past.

HOWTO: Encrypted partition

[geeveees]

modprobe loop
modprobe cryptoloop
modprobe aes

losetup -e aes /dev/loop0 /dev/hdb1
(input password)

mke2fs -j /dev/loop0

mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0 /home/kombat/pr0n

enjoy!

Where does it say MD5?

[eddy]

Are we sure they're actually using MD5? The article doesn't even contain the string "md5" that I can see. It mentions hashes though, but there's something called Robust Hashing which can be used to identify, or at least, compare content in a "fuzzy" way.

Easy

[sprouty76]

Just take a random id3 field that you don't use for anything, and fill it with a random number. You can probably write a srcipt in a few seconds. Bingo, different md5.

The only problem is that a lot of file sharing software uses the fact that 2 files (from different sources) have the same hash in order to swarm the download from multiple sources. If everybody goes around intentionally making their mp3s have different hashes, swarming basically won't work anymore.

Give up

[Rutje]

Ok guys.. let's all give it up. Let's delete all our MP3's and start buying CD's now. The RIAA has clearly won!
Hail to the king!

Re:Or Perhaps...

[perly-king-69]

Ummm, I paid for a CD the other day but I want to listen to it on my MP3 player. The CD is copy protected. I run linux. The only way I can listen to it via mp3 is to, yup, download an 'illegal' mp3! Whoever thought that up was a fscking genius.

How About An MP3 Outguess?

[thecampbeln]

Lets see someone put together an app that flips bits here and there within MP3s to make each one it runs against unique enough to create a new MD5 hash!? (I would, but I can only program in a pseudo-language ;) It could even be as simple as adding in a trailing byte to all of your MP3s, though that could be easily filtered. Hell, if you can hide messages within compressed JPEGs without noticeably affecting their quality, why not do something similar to MP3s just to jack up this sort of tracking!?

MD5 sums and different encoders

[Psyborgue]

Pretty much no rip is identical.

First step: the *.wav is ripped. Using libcdparanoia, which i personally perfer, i find slight variation in size depending on the machine and cdrom drive i rip them on.
Second step: encoding on different machines, with different encoders, using different algorythms, using different levels of floating point precision, on different architectures etc... produces vastly different files.
Third step: sharing. Oftentimes an mp3 is downloaded 99.8% before the connection is broken. You keep the mp3 becuase mp3 is a sequential file format and you only lose a second or two of music. The rest of the file is intact.

Their md5 searching scheme could be circumvented quite easily by changing a comment in the id3 but they could get around that by cutting out the id3 part of the file when they make their md5sum.
The downside to this is that if you are searching for music on something like gnutella by the ***sum, the content would differ and you would not get as many results. Gnutella would not download from multiple sources becuase the file would not have the same signature.
Whatever the case, it is clear that some form of file obfuscation is now needed for safety online. Or we can wait for freenet to mature.

Re:Now what?

[utlemming]

No, we need to create a honeypot farm. You remember that article way back when on Slashdot? It described how to implenent a whole farm. Then we strictly prohibit scanning of the networks for MD5 checksums. Since RIAA is using bots, they won't read the warning and fire off the subeona. When you get a subeona, then you slam them with a computer crime lawsuit. See, you can still get rich from RIAA. But how do you get illegal MD5 check sums with out possesing the files? If you wanna screw with RIAA you have to be damned sure that you right.

From the Napster Network??

[re-Verse]

From the NAPSTER network??? This is worse than i thought - it appears the RIAA has built a Time Machine! Next they will be going further back than napster andprosecuting free-thinking pilgrims who would share their newspapers.

Yikes.

Re:MD5-hashes

[Gherald]

> This proof of RIAA is as good as the SCO evidences of greek language or bsd firewall code against linux

Uh, actually this is irrefutable proof. It will miss a lot of songs, but it is virtually guaranteed to not give false positives. This is much more solid proof than SCO had.

To think a month or two ago when SCO was insisting on an NDA many on /. were clamoring for some MD5 sums instead...

Obviously the RIAA's technical experts know what they are doing... its time to alter a few ID3 tags like the story suggested.

What is illegal here?

[emptybody]

If I use KaZaa to access indie artists who are
sharing their songs - as is their right - AND I
also rip my entire 1000+ CD/LP/8track collection
to the same computer AND I intellegently store
all the files in the same heirarchy.

Have any laws been broken?

KaZaa is configured to share everything in my
heirarchy so that the indie songs can continue to
be shared.

Have any laws been broken?

I go in for Jury Duty, meanwhile Another Kazaa
user downloads the indie shared files.

Have any laws been broken?

Another Kazaa user downloads the rips from my
personal collection because their 8track player
is on the fritz.

Have any laws been broken?

Another Kazaa user downloads the rips from my
personal collection because their LPs were
destroyed in a flood.

Have any laws been broken?

Another Kazaa user downloads the rips from my
collection because they want to see what the
latest Madonna single sounds like before going
out and buying the CD.

Have any laws been broken?

If any laws were broken here - who broke them?

Just because I leave the front door open does not
mean that anyone can enter and take what they
want from my house. Same as my computer.
The action of downloading is at question not
making the article available.

YMMV. Consult a lawyer.

P2P modifying files..

[bobthemuse]

How long is it until a P2P client is created which appends a half second of noise to the end of everything you download, thus modifying the checksum?

I can see it now... "And in recent news, according to the RIAA there are over 10 billion songs being traded. The organization is quoted as saying 'We intend to sue individual users for having more songs than we've created...'"

Re:MD5-hashes

[nolife]

I just did some consecutive rips of an audio track and compared the md5 checksums.

I did the same song three times. The first two times, all things were equal including all settings. The MD5 checksums were the same.

I swapped out my DVD/CD player for a different model. Reripped the track on the same computer with the same exact settings and the MD5 was different.

I am using Exact Audio Copy in secure mode and Lame for the encoding. The ID tags were recieved the first time and the same tags used for all three attempts (EAC remembers the disk).

I'm sure I could try many things like changing the read speed, comparing the wav files and not just the resulting mp3 etc.. but I do not have the time for more analysis.

A failure to comunicate

[MarkusQ]

There is an interesting pattern here:

• Some one comments that the IP laws have not kept up with technolgical and social change, and that they are now impeding the cultural goals they origonally served. They may have made sense when we were limited to exchaging physical objects, but they don't make sense now.

And the responses are allong the lines of:

• But it's the law.
• I hope the RIAA gets you.
• Then I suppose an idiot like you won't mind if I take your stuff!

The respondents are completely missing the point. To see this, imagine what the discussion might have looked like if it had happened way back when:

• The rule about not eating X hasn't kept up with the times. It made sense when we didn't know about the parasites, but now that we know how to clean and cook them it doesn't makes sense.

I suspect the responses would have been along the lines of:

• But it's the law.
• I hope the gods get you.
• Then I suppose an idiot like you won't mind eating dog poop!

Every time I see this played out, my response is, "Gee, IP law really is dying, isn't it?", with the same sort of awe I had watching little bits of sand wash downstream at the bottom of the grand canyon.

-- MarkusQ

Those poor lil Country Music singers

[CoryS0L0]

The same story is posted on CNN.com. Accompanying this article is one by Marci A. Hamilton, a chairman at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. She states that going after students who illegally download media is not only OK, but is RIGHT. I wouldn't have a problem with this were it not for the reasons she supports it with. She says that a world without copyright laws would cater only to the rich and the government. When was the last time you heard of a government worker writing a song on the top 10 list? When was the last time a millionaire, (not a musician) created a song that made it to the hall of fame? My point is, without free music/media, many of the people who come up with the latest and greatest entertainment would never see any of the media that's out there. Marci claims to be looking out for the poor country music singers in her article. If they're as poor as she says, how are they ever going to be able to afford a CD at $15 a piece???

Musicians and music labels alike need to come to grips with the fact that their moneymaker, (CD sales) will need to take a back seat to actual performances by the artist. We need to take it back to the old days when music artists actually sang and performed and didn't just sit in a dark room behind some curtain tooling away on their synthesizer.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/08/07/findlaw.analysis .hamilton.music/index.html

What nobody seemed to notice.

[Awptimus Prime]

The MD5 thing isn't for tracking the same song ripped by different people. The thread on this, so far, has left me scratching my head as to why folks feel the need to restate that encoding an mp3 with different settings/software will result in a different md5. Right, this is slashdot and we all know this already.

The reason for md5 matching is so they can nail someone as the 'origin' of the ripped song, then hold them liable for all the copies of a matching md5 on P2P networks. It would be more a demonstration of "look how much damage one copy did to us!".

Lost in a Fire?

[medscaper]

A couple of years ago I lost 90% of my CD collection in an apartment fire. I had about 20 of these CDs ripped at the time and since then, I have downloaded many of the others to replace what I had paid for.

Just out of curiosity...Did you have insurance? Did they write you a check for the CDs you lost in the fire? I doubt it, but if it had happened, would still feel you had already "paid for" the CDs, and simply thumb your nose at the RIAA and Big Insurance and download the files, as you'd already "paid for" them?

I promise, I'm not begging to be flamebait. I'm really curious.

Where does the line get drawn between physical property and intellectual property, and what rights do you have if you HAD purchased it, but it's gone now? I mean, I can't go to the lot and get another car because mine is destroyed in a fire. Of course, I could go take a picture of it...but I could do that anyway.

I'm curious.

RIAA Taxes

[brj]

Don't we already pay a small tax to the recording industry every time we buy blank audio CDs (but not data CDs)? I'd like to see some lawyer fight a case claiming that a P2P user has already paid the RIAA and is therefore exempt from their lawsuits when downloading the music and burning it to an audio CD. That would be an interesting lawsuit.