Music Downloading

[Unregistered]

I'm a bit confused about music downloading, I understand that downloading music that is copyrighted and is for sale is illegal. But how do you know if it is copyrighted. Are demos and live recordings that are not for sale legal to download?

[lnp]

Well, I'm no lawyer, but my gut reaction is "No." Granted, there are certain bands (Phish, the Grateful Dead, etc.) who publicly advocate sharing of their live shows, but these groups are the exception, not the rule. Basically, any music recorded belongs to the artist that recorded it. This even holds true for works in the public domain. For example, most of J.S. Bach's music is in the public domain because its so old. But those are just notes on a page. The British Philharmonic's recordings of this music are protected legally.

Unless an artist is specifically providing the song off their webpage, its a safe bet that the work is not legal for download.

But again, there are exceptions and this is just one person's relatively narrow interpretation of what copyright law means. I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's what I've got. I don't know if the MLL's resources pages have specific articles which address music copyright and downloading, by surfing on over to mll.arizona.edu and clicking on the links under the resources tab, there are some summaries of fair use and other issues in copyright law.

[fischerm]

http://mll.arizona.edu/links under the "Copyright Resources" section near the bottom. With our current litigious system, the vast majority of stuff is copyrighted, so I would always err on the side of caution and assume that it is copyrighted. If the artist doesn't explicitly state that the work can be re-used or distributed freely, it probably can't.

Another example of bands that do encourage re-use, nine inch nails offers several very high quality multitrack files of their produced songs for you to re-mix: http://www.nin.com/downloads/index.html It's pretty amazing, but there again they do explicitly state what you can and cannot do with the materials.

[Unregistered]

thanks! I figured that was the case, just wanted to make sure!