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I think anything on the net that says its free whether it be freeware, shareware, free fonts, free clip art, free programs or whatever ought to be just that "free." The people who benefit by it should not be punished. If a person doesn't want what he creates copied it's up to him to find a way that it can not be copied. I think that's the case with music.
When you have a shovel that your neighbor doesn't have and he wants to borrow it, you are doing a nice gesture by letting him borrow it. You could say, "No that wouldn't be right, you need to go to the store and buy your own." There are services people charge for and services that people do gratis, like leaving behind artwork at a walldog meet.
With downloading music off the net, someone originally paid for the CD and was able to copy it onto his hard drive. If he could not copy it it could not be share with others. The music industry has not gone after Microsoft, because they made it possible on their Windows Media Player to copy CDs. Instead they are going after the guy at the bottom threatening huge punishments because he's using Kazaa to share songs with others. That to me seems absurd. They were able to punish Napster and regulate them, but Kazaa , Morpheus and others made it harder to detect sharing, because it went pier to pier. There are already attempts to encrypt file sharing to make it even harder to find out whose sharing songs.
I have had this debate with my musician buddies many times and it really gets the brain spinning. I have 1 friend who I jam with for free who is vehemently against sharing songs via the net, but doesn't think twice about playing a cover song and getting paid for it when he plays with his group on the weekends. We all listen to music on the radio. To me continually compensating musicians for their songs is where the debate rages on. The recent Supreme Court decision giving a musician's family the right to demand residuals for songs authored by their deceased relatives is further evidence of a greedy industry.
We need to define what stealing is compared to what sharing is. I can see punishing a person who downloads songs off the internet and then burns a bunch of songs to sell to others, but giving a CD to a friend and saying "Listen to these guys," and them doing the same is sharing. Being able to copy a CD has enabled this debate to rage on. -- Bill
-------------------- Bill Diaz Diaz Sign Art Pontiac IL www.diazsignart.com Posts: 2111 | From: Pontiac, IL | Registered: Dec 2001
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