Something I think everyone needs to know about file sharing. There is a law in the USA and elsewhere in the world called Copyright. It gives artists a monopoly on their own works, as it should be, for a set period of time. When you infringe on copyright (copy and/or distribute those works without permission from the artist) you are breaking the law as it stands now and can be held accountable for it. Discwatch.com does not endorse this. It is never okay to break a law you don’t happen to agree with. I will give you an example. I know the following facts are true: The Entertainment Industry used their resources to buy a series of copyright extensions thereby changing a fundamental principal in copyright law, namely cheating the public out of a viable, healthy public domain. Copyright in the USA was introduced by the Constitution of the United States of America. The original wording of copyright gave the artist permission to monopolize his/her own works for a LIMTED amount of time. The entertainment industry used their resources to make “limited” mean “unlimited”. As it stands now, Copyright law protects works 75 years after the artist’s death. If an artist creates a song when he’s 20 and dies when he’s 90, that song wont won’t reach the public domain for 145 years. Bang! Just like that, our public domain became a museum for works of art created so long ago, their relevance to our culture lags by more then a century, ensuring that we will forever have an antiquated and extremely dull public domain. In my opinion, a limited period of time is a few years, 5 at the outside. Just because I know this, it gives me no right to copy and distribute copyrighted works 5 years after they were made. That being said…

ATTENTION ENTERTAINEMT INDUSTRY. What is your problem? Seriously, I would like to know. You can’t really believe that sharing in LOW (and I mean LOW) quality MP3s is doing anything but boosting your sales. You might have everyone else fooled but I don’t buy it, something doesn’t add up...
For those of you less techy, but nonetheless wired people, an MP3 format popular on p2p networks are compressed to play at 128 kbs. The music on a CD is sampled at a MUCH higher rate (on the order of 11X higher- 1411kbs ) bottom line here is that music traded on the internet is only 1/11 of the actual recording, a mere ghost , a whisper if you will, of the store bought original. Radio stations can deliver a better song, quality wise, then a low quality MP3. The industry knows this. To top it all off, the industry makes money on every Compact Disk sold in the USA. Blank media included. Even when you think you are getting around CR law, you find out that you are in fact not!
Let’s say I downloaded the ACDC album “Back in Black”. I go to the store and get 50 blank CDs and burn 50 copies of that album that’s my own choice, the royalties are paid when I got the blanks, so I ask you again, what is your problem?
I don’t know for sure but I used to have a magic act of my own, mostly coins and cards, close up stuff where timing and misdirection can make or break the effect. I see the industry doing the same thing here. They are distracting you from what is really going on. Don’t you buy into it! Don’t believe lame scream media I implore you. Its not about the money, it’s not about the music or hungry artists or even file trading per se. The RIAA reported record sales for the past 3 years in a row. Does this sound to anyone like a business that is failing? I think that what they are really after, what this has all been about, is direct control over everything you see and hear all day. Before the internet, they enjoyed decades of monopolizing the media, selectively reporting one narrow view of our world. The internet took that away from them over night. They want it back.

--LamerX