It still blows my mind that people insist that the only use for Napster is illegal purposes. It seems to me that there are two perfectly legal and legit uses for the service.
- Downloading music that isn't copyrighted
or
- Downloading music that you ALREADY OWN ON CD
Its the second point that in my opinion is the bigger of the two. Say i own every Metallica (ugh, but for the sake of example) CD available, but i'd like to listen to some of the songs on my PC. Its perfectly legal under fair use to format shift those cd's to mp3's, if for personal use. AND, on a fast connection, i can download songs faster than i can rip them from cd.
Now, my other gripe is that from Napster's point of view, they can only see whats being searched for. They can neither tell if the music is indeed being downloaded at all, nor tell if the person downloading owns a legitimate copy of the music, or if the music is copyrighted at all.
Seems to me that napster should be protected as is every other search engine on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
It still blows my mind that people insist that the only use for Napster is illegal purposes. It seems to me that there are two perfectly legal and legit uses for the service.
- Downloading music that isn't copyrighted
or
- Downloading music that you ALREADY OWN ON CD
Its the second point that in my opinion is the bigger of the two. Say i own every Metallica (ugh, but for the sake of example) CD available, but i'd like to listen to some of the songs on my PC. Its perfectly legal under fair use to format shift those cd's to mp3's, if for personal use. AND, on a fast connection, i can download songs faster than i can rip them from cd.
Now, my other gripe is that from Napster's point of view, they can only see whats being searched for. They can neither tell if the music is indeed being downloaded at all, nor tell if the person downloading owns a legitimate copy of the music, or if the music is copyrighted at all.
Seems to me that napster should be protected as is every other search engine on the planet.
Whatever though...
dusty