READ THE FINE PRINT! If you can find the fine print, they feed you this garbage about downloading and sharing responsibly, etc., etc. In other words, don't get caught! One of the more common disclaimers you will find on these scam sites reads like this: "Some information is protected by copyright, which means that you generally need the copyright owner's permission before you make it available to other P2P users. Popular music, movies, games, and software are often protected by copyright."
Okay, so let's decipher this disclaimer: "Some information is protected by copyright, which means that you generally need the copyright owner's permission before you make it available to other P2P users." Generally need? If it has a copyright, you always need the owner's permission. If you're going to make it available to other P2P users, you're making it available to millions of users. Okay, so how do you get the copyright owner's permission? If you could even find the copyright owner, do you think that they're going to give you permission to make their production available to millions of other people for free?
Or how about: "Click here for information on how to use this P2P software application to download music for free online and minimize or avoid copyright infringement."
Minimize? Avoid? In other words, "Click here for information on how to use this P2P software application to illegally download and minimize getting caught or avoid getting caught altogether". What? Are they crazy? Of course they're not crazy! They know that there are millions of people out there who either aren't going to read the fine print or are going to take their chances.
So, how about the sites that really are free? They aren't going to ask you for a dime for a free download. Get it? Free? The neat thing about a lot of these really, truly, 100% legal sites like Insound, CMJ.com or Overplay where you can download music for free online, is that most of the music on these sites is from new artists hoping to get noticed by a record label. You can find some very good music if you're determined and just put forth a little effort in your searches. Just like MP3, peer-to-peer is a technology and the technology itself is not illegal! There are lots of legal MP3s from great artists on many, many online sites such as GarageBand.com or iSound.com. The problem is that some people use peer-to-peer to make one copy of an album and make that copy available on the Internet for hundreds of thousands of people. Not only is it unfair, it's illegal! |