Illegal or not - MP3 filesharing

As a Dad of two teenagers, who have both just got new hard drive MP3 players, I am getting daily requests from them both to sign up to a host of Music download sites (most of which are USA based). The latest is MyMusicInc.com - a file sharing site on the Gunetella Network (???). This site is advertised on Google as a "legal" free download site - but heres my question - is it ?

How do I check / know what sites are legal / illegal and so on. Has anyone any advice in this area ? I am reading in the papers of Parents getting surprise bills for illegal downloads carried out by their kids in a similar situation to myself.

I use a site called MP3 rocket and it lets me see if the music i am downloading has a legal license for the music to be shared. If it does not then it warns me before you are allowed to progress with the download i.e. you do so at your own peril. the site costs 30 dollars for a lifetime membership and also allows you to download movies. I have no affiliation to this site

Gooner - technically it is not the sites you need to be concerned with, it is each individual track. The copyright exists in the music, so the question is whether each track that your children want to download is copyright-free or not.

Having said that, typically you can categorise the sites into "don't care about copyright, here's all the files" and "we only do non-copyright files" sites.

z

This site is advertised on Google as a "legal" free download site - but heres my question - is it ?

Click to expand...

The short and simple answer is NO.

The longer more complicated answer is actually YES - file sharing through a peer-to-peer network is, itself, not illegal. Gnutella is one of the popular file sharing networks similar to Kazaa, eDonkey and Napster (there are of course differences between these p2p networks technically but all "generally" try and achieve the same end result for the user - i.e. sharing files on one PC with another PC via the internet). The illegality around file sharing comes with the content being shared. You can share open source, public licence or non-copyrighted material to your hearts content but you cannot share copyrighted material without paying for it.

Some Legal sites for music download are Napster, iTunes and Rhapsody but there are many others. Then there are the sites that border on legality e.g. allofmp3.com do request a payment per download but there have been concerns expressed that these payments are not getting back to the owners of the copyrighted material (ie artists, songwriters etc).

So how do parents / users check what is legal and what is not? - There is no definite list out there that says what's good and what's not so it comes down to individual common sense - any site backed by a large or well known corporation (e.g. iTunes (Apple), Rhapsody (Real Networks) etc is going to be ok as is any site that is charging you a reasonable price per song or album; sites that offer you 500 songs for $5.00 would seem slightly dodgy to me as are sites offering songs for free. However, the best thing to do is to research the area yourself, know what's going on and possibly involve your kids in it as well.

Another thing to keep in mind with some file sharing networks is that they share more than just music - they can share software (which might be pirated / hacked), TV shows (before they are shown in Europe) and movies (including Pornographic movies) - I don't want to be scare mongering just pointing out what is out there.

I will caveat all the above by saying I am not an expert and there are many on this board who would have better knowledge than I on this matter - but thought I would post my thoughts anyway!

Hope it helps

That musicinc site is using social engineering to get you to pay them to download files from them in the exact same way you would if you were using limewire or bearshare etc.
It, and other sites like them, use P2P tools like the above, but they have lots of banner ads with "We're legal" and "youre paying so it must be legit" and testimony from your next door neighbour mary o'malley who says "its great". So you log on, pay some guy in romania 30$ (who now has your creditcard details) to illegally get files when you could illegally get them for free using limewire in the first place. If you want to do it legally use itunes, eircom etc. Otherwise just download limewire/newsgroups/torrents etc alternatively wear a big jacket and go into hmv.

Rasco - Sounds like the MP3 Rocket site has a mixture of licenced and unlicenced material ? Is it predominately licenced material onthe site or is that the exception ...... thanks....

mp3 rocket does the exact same thing as limewire and bearshare. Its just another client for downloading songs files from gnutella. Trust me on this, if you download songs, movies, apps from gnutella using ANY client youre going to be running the risk of infringing copyright. If your sons want to download music and you want to be sure youre doing it 100% legally, use itunes or eircom and the like. 99c per song or whatever it is now. Yes, some bands do put out free mp3s, but none in the Uk Top 40 that I know of.
Also on gnutella, even with adult search filter off, its nearly impossible to search for anything without getting returns of "debbie likes big <insert desired appendage>.mpg". know what i mean?
Gnutella does have its uses tho (check out Direct IP link on limewire for transferring files online from pc to another) so if youre determined to at least try it, Id suggest limewire as the client for its features.