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NYT Promotes File Sharing
aisaac writes "An article in today's NYT comments intelligently on filesharing. Key points: downloading music is not illegal, peer-to-peer enables this useful and legal activity, and a list of good places to find good music online (including the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress. The Induce Act is briefly mentioned without analysis, but the article does not mention that some of the Act's sponsors and cosponsors have expressed a willingness to consider ammendments to restrict the application of the Act. (This according to a letter I received from Senator Sarbanes.) Let's keep the pressure on!" A Congress call-in day is being organized.
How true. But nobody comes to slashdot for an objective opinion.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
No Fears: Laptop D.J.'s Have a Feast
.com/music/mp3s.html), Vagrant (www.vagrant .com/vagrant/audio/audio.jsp), Barsuk (www.barsuk .com), Saddle Creek (www.saddle-creek.com) or Tigerbeat6 (www.tigerbeat6.com/html/catalogue.htm).
.wnyc.org) and eclectic stations like WFMU in Jersey City (www.wfmu.org) and KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif. (www.kcrw.org), all of which have troves of live performances. MTV (at www.mtv.com) presents an entire album each week as an audio stream.
By JON PARELES
OWNLOADING music from the Internet is not illegal. Plenty of music available online is not just free but also easily available, legal and ? most important ? worth hearing.
That fact may come as a surprise after highly publicized lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America, representing major labels, against fans using peer-to-peer programs like Grokster and EDonkey to collect music on the Web. But the fine print of those lawsuits makes clear that fans are being sued not for downloading but for unauthorized distribution: leaving music in a shared folder for other peer-to-peer users to take. As copyright holders, the labels have the exclusive legal right to distribute the music recorded for them, even if technology now makes that right nearly impossible to enforce.
Recording companies have tried and failed to shut down decentralized file-sharing networks the way they closed the original Napster. (That name is now being used for a paid-download service.)
Courts have ruled that the services can continue because they are also used to exchange material that does not infringe on recording-company copyrights. At the same time, a bill before Congress, the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004, seeks to restrict the way file-sharing programs are constructed.
While the recording business litigates and lobbies over music being given away online, countless musicians are taking advantage of the Internet to get their music heard. They are betting that if they give away a song or two, they will build audiences, promote live shows and sell more recordings.
As with the rest of the free content on the Internet, there's no guaranteed quality control. Lucas Gonze, whose webjay.org lets music fans post playlists that connect to free music and video, describes free Internet music as "a flea market the size of Valhalla."
The first place to look for free music online is at musicians' own sites. Many performers, from Bob Dylan (www.bobdylan.com) to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (www.yeahyeahyeahs.com), post hard-to-find songs for listening: some as free downloads, some as streaming audio (which can be recorded with a free program like StepVoice at www.stepvoice.com). A next place to look is the labels, particularly independent rock and electronic labels like Matador (www.matadorrecords
Many public radio stations also maintain music archives for streaming or downloading. Among them are the classical-music station WNYC (www
Following is a selection of sites offering free music online. Most of them are best used with a either a broadband connection or nearly infinite patience. While major-label recordings are largely (but not entirely) off limits, there's more than enough available music to satisfy every listener.
Epitonic
The first and best place to look for any band with an independent recording is www.epitonic.com, a superbly organized site that is likely to have music from nearly everyone heard on college radio. It includes not only downloadable songs but also biographical information and links for hundreds of acts, grouped under genres and subgenres. And it has an invaluable "Similar Artists" feature that can direct fans of one band to dozens of potential new favorites. Within Epitonic's huge roster is at least a song or two from some major-label acts, among them the New York band Secret Machines, the Texas band Sparta and the English bands Radiohead and Spiritualized. But independent bands
You can back up a lot of stuff to your iPods, then sneaker net it over to your buddys house.
:D
That alwasy seems to be the best method, and even thought the latency is bad, the bandwidth is unlimited
Epitonic is a great place to listen to some tracks from independent bands and even has links to promote buying CDs from the bands -- after all, if everyone's griping about the artist not getting the funds, then when you do find music you like, you should support the artist. RIAA Radar is a good way to check whether the label is a member of the RIAA or not; if not, go buy a CD! If so, just check the used record stores and the RIAA doesn't get your money. Buying the independent music is a better move overall, though. And a recent comment on my weblog pointed out some other places to get music. (Gmail invites available there for additional suggestions, too.)
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
I know that /. is US-centric, but I'd like to take the ocassion to state that this [downloading of copyrighted material] is legal is some countries.
Ok, it's redundant, but to summarize other replies, it is absolutely legal in CA, NO, NL, BE, FR, CH, LU and probably many other european countries.
#include "coucou.h"
Copyright infringement is when you infringe on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder. So, the unauthorized distributer/public displayer, etc. of a copyrighted work is infringing on the copyright holder's exlusive right to distribute their work as they see fit.
So, no it's not illegal to download copyrighted material from an unauthorized distributer. However, the distributer is infringing on someone else's copyrights, and there is definitely a moral dilemna in that you are helping to create a demand for the infringer's actions.
I don't think it will happen any time soon; however, there is always the possibility that Congress will change the law to include "contributing to infringement" as an offense as well, which could be construed as to include receiving nonauthorized distributions of materials.
What?
The original poster got the point of the thing exactly wrong. This isn't about unauthorized music, it's about sticking to music which is both free and authorized.
Filesharing networks are full of hit songs which are unauthorized. Out on the public/stable web there's a huge amount of unknown stuff which is authorized. The trick with Webjay and other sources mentioned in the article is finding the few great songs in the whole sea of crud. If you can do that, you can have good music which the rights holder doesn't mind you having, though you usually have to give up on name brand musicians.
There's also some kind of Gnu-ish angle that I've never been able to articulate well... It's something like -- if you *choose* to listen to music that isn't from insane powermad label types, you get (more) liberty, and if you choose to listen to non-free music, you give up liberty. That's not quite right because almost none of this music is under a free or open license, though.
FWIW I'm the author of Webjay.org and was quoted in the story.
Like magnatune.com in particular. I've bought a few things off that that I really liked (one was a gift actually, and the recipiant really likes it).
It's very cool you can pay what you think the album is worth, from $5 to more and as an added bonus get full quality wavs of the music when you buy the album (as opposed to just the mp3s you can download and try for free).
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Parent is informative. Under UK law the definition of theft is "Dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it" and US law is basically the same. In the case of file sharing the property owner is not permanently deprived of their property therefore it's not theft.
I'm not an apologist for file sharers but copyright infringement is not theft, it's copyright infringement. That's why it's called copyright infringement and not theft.
As a side note, if the RIAA did manage to get copyright infringement redefined as theft then "I didn't know" would become a valid defence as the dishonesty requirement would not be met.
Wait, so the sentiment around here, as you see it, is that sharing copyrighted materials is only ok if they're older than 28 years old, and I can develop a closed-source version of GNU emacs in 2012?
I took what he said to mean "Yes", in answer to your question. I would support what he said, as well.
You see, copyright is evil, in its most basic form. Its evil because it grants a Creator huge rights over the public, by giving the Creator a monopoly. This act of evilness is considered acceptable because in exchange for this monopoly, the Creator must agree to place his work in the public domain after a certain period of time.
However, the RIAA and MPAA (and many so-called artists) would have you think that Creative Works are never supposed to go into the public domain, and they will take action to prevent it (the most notorious being Disney who lobbies for changes in the law everytime Mickey Mouse comes up for expiration). This is in violation of the first principles of copyright, and if you were to ask me (which you haven't) should result in the complete revocation of copyright on anybody who tries to prevent their work from going into the public domain. DRM of any sort is exactly such an attempt.
Like what I said? You might like my music
It is not copying according to the definitions of USC 17 Subsection 101. Copying, according to the letter of the law, is making a physical copy, not downloading. "Copies are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term copies includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed."
No doubt this is just one meaning of the word and can change according to how important legal filesharing alternatives become.
You'd be amazed how important the legal filesharing alternatives have become. For instance, over at bt.etree.org you can see several shows that have had thousands of downloads.
Some people have a way with words, others not have way.