Since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has started handing out subpoenas for swapping copyrighted music, illegal file sharing has become a topic on everyone’s mind.
I have hundreds of MP3s on my hard drive, and I wonder what would happen if it was my name on the list of those being subpoenaed.
People have different reasons for downloading music. My reasons include: replacing music I’ve lost or that is too scratched to listen to, listening to more of an artist’s songs to decide if I really want the CD and finding the really underground or hard-to-find songs.
I do not have anything in my shared folder anymore, and I have turned off file sharing on my computer, but I think if they wanted to prosecute me, they could probably still get enough information from my hard drive.
This should concern many of you. So far all of the people targeted have lived in large cities, but what happens when they finish suing them and move on to us?
One of the people being sued is taking a stand and refusing to give her name to the RIAA. Her attorney calls her only “Jane Doe” and her KaZaA name is “nycfashiongirl.”
By fighting the RIAA, she is placing herself in a sort of catch-22, because if she wins her right to privacy, everything works out great, but if the RIAA wins and is able to find out who she is, you know they will prosecute her to the full extent of the law.
“Nycfashiongirl” has to be scared to death. I know I would be.
So, apparently you don’t get into as much trouble for downloading as for making the files available to others. The RIAA says that “Jane Doe” made the files available on the Internet, not just KaZaA.
Therein lies the legal dispute. Surprisingly, the Republican Party favors downloaders over the RIAA on this issue. Some congressmen are even saying the RIAA violated due process in their lawsuits against file sharers. I thought Republicans were supposed to be pro-big business?
There seems to be some good coming out of all this. Clear lines are being drawn defining what is legal and what is illegal, CD prices have been lowered considerably and sales from new online MP3 music stores appear to be promising.
Who wouldn’t pay a little less than a dollar for a song?
This all became clear to me one day as I thought about what songs to download next.
I realized that I didn’t have much classic rock. When I thought about downloading some Pink Floyd, it became clear, that kind of music is not downloadable, because you have to have the album in its entirety and listen from start to finish. That is really the root of why I download.
I guess I just refuse to pay money for music I know is crap, but it gets stuck in my head and the only way to make it go away is to give in and listen to it.
The really good stuff requires you to have the whole CD; each song compliments the next and all of them together tell a story.
Those artists deserve to be paid for their work because it is from the heart and beautiful. The bubble gum, trendy singers can make money in other ways, like product endorsements, but true artists deserve payment for giving a piece of themselves to their art.
To sum it up, if you put your heart and feelings in front of the world to be judged, you have created art. If you write a song in hopes that everyone will buy your album and you will become rich, you are a sell-out and don’t deserve America’s hard earned money.

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