David Runnion wrote:

>While we're talking about downloading, I have to say I love Apple's
>iTunes, where you can purchase recordings easily at reasonable prices.

Be aware that purchases from online music stores contain a variety of
technical limitations that effectively deny you legal rights, such as
being able to sell, or even give away, the tracks you purchased in the
same way that you can sell or give away a CD. They also routinely place
anti-competitive limits on the types of equipment you can play them on,
in order to tie you in to specific vendors' products and services.

Criminalizing any attempts to overcome these restrictions in order to
exercise existing rights effectively treats those actual paying customers,
who fund the entire recording business, like potential crooks.  Yet so
far, no digital rights management (DRM) system comes close to protecting
copyright holders' interests without trampling all over purchasers'
rights.

There's more information on these restrictions here:

  http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/guide/
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

Here's some commentary on specific problems customers have had while
trying to do reasonable things:

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4474143.stm
  http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5072842.html

The French (who know something about Liberty) are currently working
on new law that outlaws defeating DRM while also outlawing potentially
anti-competitive behaviour by vendors:

  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/21/france_drm_interop/

>All this to say: Stay away from the P2P services!  They are all illegal,
>and every time you d/l something from there you are taking money from
>artists' pockets.

I think you need to add two provisos to this bold claim:

  + a mechanism must exist to pay for the recording
  + a willingness must exist to pay for the recording

Otherwise, I don't see how any money got 'taken'.

There are many recordings of things available online that are almost
certainly still owned by someone in the strict sense of copyright, but
that don't appear to be on sale anywhere.  For example, this site contains
MP3 rips of out-of-print, non-reissued vinyl albums; if you downloaded
one of these, whose money did you 'take'?

  http://recordbrother.typepad.com/imagesilike/

And if you would never have paid for a track (because you're a skinflint,
or broke, or just kicking the tyres of some new composer to see if you
like their work), whose money did you 'take'?

(I keep putting 'take' in quotes, because I think it's a misleading
analogy to talk about taking something that was never available to be
taken.)

Note that I'm not advocating the impoverishment of artists, but I
believe it's a fallacy to equate every unauthorized copy with stolen
income, especially as many record companies would like you to see *every*
copy they didn't separately bill you for as unauthorized.

I know that I've downloaded material in order to find out if I'm remotely
interested in buying it, and that not all those downloads led to purchases;
those that didn't, got deleted.

I also know that, if I *have* to buy it before I can see or hear it,
I'll buy less.  So, at least in my case, being able to download material
has actually put money *into* artists' pockets that otherwise wouldn't
be there.

Frank Wales [[log in to unmask]]