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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.
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
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.