Just heard on the radio today that australian authorities raided several places in connection with kazaa and are looking to shut it down. Download what you can while you still can.
rock on
ellisd

...and for those who understand and respect the nature of property law and rights, this won't affect you at all.

Couldn't have said it better myself......

A C Spectre

Just to set the record straight, they weren't raided by Australian authorities, they were raided by the record companies themselves. Everything that was seized has now been sealed awaiting various court actions to determine whether the raids were in accordance with the original orders.

To bad these same sharks (The RIAA) won’t be going after people in their own backyard. No doubt they have mothers and fathers, brothers or sisters, nieces and nephews, next-door neighbors and friends that are doing the exact same thing.

Of course they won’t have to go to court or face a lawsuit. This is nothing more than a clear and unmistakable double standard.

Well sorry guys but after having attended about 30 or forty concerts at about 30 dollars a pop and paying anywhere from 25 to 30 dollars for a tshirt cry me a river. Do any of you want to state that no one has ever made a tape for you of different songs or you to them. You've never bought a used cd from a fleamarket? You've never borrowed a copy of a book or anything else for that matter instead of buying it brand new? Im not debating the legallity of it I just think some of you should get off your high horses. When you die the only thing that's yours is what you've learned. Let me know when the first billion dollar record company goes broke or the next recording artist cant afford the good drugs anymore and I'll give them a full refund.

While I basicaly agree with the above statement, There are hundreds if not thousands of songs and photo's on Kazaa that are in the public domain. It is too bad that so often the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater instead of focusing on the real problem.
My solution is to go hard after the illegal stuff and leave the legal stuff alone for all of us to share and enjoy.
Iven

If you think the concert tickets or their T-shirt is too expensive, don't buy them.



When I buy a CD from a flea market, or buy a book from a garage sale, the ownership is being transferred to me. The original owner isn't selling an unauthorized copy (if they are, it's illegal) and they aren't retaining an unauthorized copy (if they are it's also illegal).

When you download a copyrighted song using Kazaa, it doesn't disappear from the Kazaa database. You are making an unauthorized copy of it.



Property rights are enforcable whether or not there is a sufficient financial effect on the creator. Remember, the same law that protects their privacy rights, protects your privacy rights.

If you like Kazaa try also SKYPE:
http://www.skype.com/
Its the same team that did Kazaa..
Works excellent

The big court case has just recently begun here in Canada. The Canadian Recording Industry is trying to get the Supreme Court into forcing ISP's to turn over the names of people who are downloading music. It's believed that if a court order is granted most will comply. With one, Shaw Cablesystems (my provider), challenging the order under the basis of privacy infringement.

Now that Kazaa is in a decline if you're interested, and I'm not promoting this software in any ways, but check out bittorrent at http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/ it's been out for quite a while and I use it to download very big files. The good thing is this software awards downloaders more bandwith by upload/sharing, which makes everyone happy. Bad thing is not a lot of people use it so there's limited things you can do with it. I'm having a blast downloading stuff for my own thing though.

Scott: The fact is that people download things off of file sharing programs for all kinds of reasons. For you to chastize anybody who uses them is unfair and probably hipocritical.

If you (as mentioned above) have borrowed a book, made a mix-taper for a loved one, Put a photo copy of a comic strip on the office wall, etc.. You are guilty of the same thing.

First of all people that download music are not "music pirates" they are not making any money off of this. It is a community not unlike the Café. You are sharing information, show and tell.

_______________

Personally I hope all the record companies go out of business.

and no I do not download music off of the internet (allthough I used to years ago.)

This whole thing is a sham in my opinion and fat,rich, artless, ceo's are manipulating artists to make money for them. Because they know that if people stop buying cds; they (ceos) will lose their money. However the artists will remain and grow even stronger, better and more free.

The record companies have hijacked music and it needs to be set free. Im not saying that artists shouldn't get paid, quite the contrary. I feel that slimeballs should not get paid for deciding what america gets to listen to.

The record companies are losing most of their money two young boys and girls who are not buying anymore of the junk music that the companies are putting out. They are losing money on artists like Spears and horrible manufactured rap music. And if it continues long enough record companies will not be able to create music like this and then force mtv to play it all day long and once again young people could be presented with a choice in music.

Matt

I don't download either, except for songs in the public domain, but the copyright laws need to be reviewed. For those of you who are old enough to remember, the record companies went nuts when cassette tapes came out. They were sure that they were all going to be driven out of business due to copying. The laws were changed to allow limited copying, but people copied records and tapes all the time for friends or other uses. The record companies turned the other cheek rationalizing that it was OK, not much of it was going on.

The Movie Studio people went crazy went video tape recorders came out, but again the law was addressed so that they went away even though the problem didn't.

Today, however, the internet has allowed the exchanging of music to increase by several orders of magnitude. What has changed? Nothing, except the amount of music being exchanged (read dollars lost by the music companies).

I think the performing artists are due their royalties and have no problem with that...and those that can produce their music and make it available directly over the internet will probably do very well. The record producers are becoming less relevant in the business model and they, better than anybody, know it and are fighting for their very survival.

The copyright laws are a hundred years old and never ever anticipated anything like this. The law needs to be rewritten by people with more expertise in this area than me.

By the way...I love buying only the music I like rather than spend $12=$16 for a CD with only one or two songs on it.

Steven