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.

Comments

Following the logic.

[erick99]

I get genuinely confused about what is legal and illegal in terms of downloading copyrighted music. The NYT in this article starts out with what appears to be an overly broad statement:

DOWNLOADING music from the Internet is not illegal.

But that at least seems to be based on what is involved in the lawsuits and not purely on the law or so this next quote seems to say:

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.

I understand that the lawsuits have focused on people who have uploaded music and the conventional wisdom is that if you only download you won't get sued.

So, I am still confused and the article only confused me further

Cheers,

Erick