I was one of the millions that jumped on the Napster bandwagon during its heyday. I had been online for only about a year, so the internet was still new to me. I thought things couldn't get easier - downloading music for free. One evening, I tried to get to the Napster site and it was shut down. No problem here; someone at work told me about another site that had just opened a few weeks earlier called Kazaa. Once again, downloading music for free. I used Kazaa and downloaded probably 300 songs, which I put the majority of on cd and deleted the mp3 files from my harddrive. There was talk on the news everywhere you looked about the internet and copyright infringement. I had to do a research paper for my graduate school business law class, so I picked copyright infringement, since it was a timely subject. But I still continued to download the songs until one day last year when I read about a plain, middle class woman down in Hart County, an hour south of Louisville, who got socked with a big lawsuit from record companies for copyright infringement. Since then, I never downloaded any more songs unless they were from AOL's music site.
I was looking at the Wal-Mart site the other day, comparing prices on TVs, when something caught my eye on their home page - music downloads. I clicked on it, and was surprised to find that you can buy and download music. Not crappy music that nobody's heard of - current, popular songs, plus tons of oldies. They only charge 88 cent a song. That's a bargain for peace of mind, knowing that I paid for a song that noone will sue me over months from now. You can pay for the music with your Visa or Mastercard, or use your Sam's or Wal-Mart credit card, or you can do like I did - on a trip to Wal-Mart this weekend, I bought a $10 Wal-Mart card to use. Just go to www.walmart.com and look in the lower right side of the home page for "Wal-Mart Music Downloads" and click on that. You will have a small download and then you'll be ready to go.
Some people will still argue that once a person buys a cd, it's theirs and they can do what they want to with it, even if that means making the songs available for others to download online. Others will argue that the artists are getting ripped off because people are getting their music for free instead of buying it. I'm somewhere in the middle of these two camps; I think that the songwriters are the ones getting ripped off. They don't make nearly as much as the artists that record their songs, and when we download a song illegally, it's taking money from their pockets. I've written a couple of songs, and have them copyrighted, plus I have the honor of knowing a few bigtime songwriters from Nashville who've written songs that have been big hits. So let's help out the songwriters - buy the songs, where at the Wal-Mart site or on the new Napster site where you pay a monthly fee or other pay sites. Just don't call me to recommend a lawyer if you get caught for copyright infringement.
1 comment:
About this whole "copyright infringement" prosecution, I have two alternatives:
1. http://www.dogpile.com/ab.dogpl.a/search/nosearchterm.htm?qcat=audio&qkw= - this is the Dogpile Audio Search. It searches for third party sites that store music on their web servers, and you can download it to your computer as if you were viewing their website. Anonymous[almost], and free.
2. Use Kazaa[or WinMX[better[butter?]]], but change the settings so that A) No one can download from you, you just download from other people, B) your folder of music is empty [you can do this by moving the songs to a diff. folder when you finish downloading a group/album/mix]. From what I've heard, the feds [RIAA] finds you by trying to download music from you, and based on what songs you have in your shared folder, they know whether or not you're a music stealer.
Post a Comment