I think that its definately a grey area.But a copy is a copy...but its the BIG copiers,who get a few thousand mp3s and sell them to friends or to the public that bring down the system.

Others hate the way the record companys work,so they do that too ...

Personaly i think that if there were more sites where you could sample a short section of the music first,and then buy it,would be fine for me ,life without kazaa.besides its being taken down..

Napsters dead,Kazaa sorta gets around it by having no real central point. So they started sueing the owners of the music :)

i dont have HEAPs,i have a couple,and that caused me to buy the cd.i cant stand 128k mp3.Even if i got high quality mp3 off it,if theres enough good songs on the cd,i would buy it-buit thats the problem,no variety here in NZ,just top40!

grrrr annoying
Cheers!

All the copyright and lost revenue noise is absurd. People will collect all they can because it's free, and only because it's free. When it costs money, nobody's interested. The big iTune launch - what have they got, .000001 % of the Kazaa action?

Music publishers talk about the lost billions - do they really believe that if it wasn't for the Internet and Napster, those 15 year old kids would have bought $68,000 worth of CDs instead of downloading MP3s? Give me a break: downloading HELPED the recorded music business - CD sales went UP when Napster was in business and plunged when they were shut down. People won't take a chance on a $18 CD without hearing it. When they could download tunes and check it out first, they went out to buy.

The truth is that the majority of CD sales are centered around MTV and radio exposure - one tune or one video is used to market an entire CD that's usually 99% crap. What on-line music sharing might do is impact the purchase of a CD based on a single - and to that extent impacts sales. But the argument that downloads directly represent lost sales? That's just pure BS.

I think this is similar to what you guys are saying about free access to shared music on systems like Kazaa and Napster. You're saying that is is acting like advertising to "try before you buy." I think you're saying it's bringing you into stores to buy the things you like the most. Also sounds like you're saying that there's no loss, since the people who aren't paying wouldn't be paying anyway. The only difference is their access to the material. They wouldn't have cared to even check it out if it weren't free.

A while back, when I worked at NCR, somebody got one of those flying toaster screen savers. It proliferated. Did that company lose hundreds of dollars? No way! Nobody would have bought that. Maybe one person, but not everyone that copied it.

The record companies would be smart to offer 96Kbs copies of their stuff for free. It would shut down a lot of the copying of the better quality stuff, and people who wanted a high quality CD would buy one. Especially if the price were not the bloated figure that they charge now. The record companies always wanted the radio stations to play their stuff for the exposure. Remember Payola? Trading low quality copies would be even more exposure.

Effectively i use kazaa as the same as a listening post in CD store, but just with a variety of 999x more than the entire new zealand can offer...

also i use sites such as

• breakbeat audio link

Another problem the record industry overlooks in their attempt to regain revenue by chasing down kids for stolen music. Is that today's adults are not buying music because there isn't any. Sure I sound just like my parents did when we were kids, and my parents - parents, et all. The difference is that when we were kids and our parents had a dislike for 'our music' they were still going off to the record store to buy 'their music' Obviously the record industry, and more important, the artist are loosing revenue from downloader's. prosecuting kids is silly. I used to like the napenator to sample a few things out and try and decide which cd would have the best selection on it for an new artist I had not yet heard. For me it was always just a testing ground since the quality of a burned mp3 is more like an anomaly compared to original cuts. due lire per mai

Frankly, when I see public discussions about IP issues, I realize that what is being discussed is general ideas about what people think is "fair" and what is not. I know that's the level where I'm most comfortable. Where it gets funny, is when people start talking about what they think is law.

I'm here to tell you, if an opinion about a matter of IP law is rendered by someone that isn't a practicing PTO attorney, that opinion is completely useless. It may be an interesting opinion, but it is probably not valid in respect to the law. Even if the person making the opinion is an attorney - If they aren't specialized in dealing with the PTO, they might as well be selling ice cream on the corner.

So I think I agree with you and everyone else here that maybe having some mechanism for sampling an entertainment product might be a good idea. But I also wanted to throw in the thought that there might be more at stake for some of the IP owners than just the profit motive. There could be much more serious potential liabilities that many of us don't know to consider.