Anybody who’s been online with high-speed access has probably experienced the thrill of trying out a peer-to-peer program such as Limewire or Gnutella or, back in the day, Napster. All those mp3 songs, free for the taking!
(For the uninitiated, these peer-to-peer or P2P programs let you search collections of files hoarded by other P2P users, and download their music to your own hard drive. Likewise, others on the P2P network can retrieve files from you. Entire feature-films are traded this way, as well as hundreds of thousands of mp3 tracks. A more popular form of P2P trading today is called BitTorrent).
Without getting into the morality of it, there is one thing you should know about using Limewire and other P2P applications: It’s become a very risky thing to do. Akin to, let’s say, engaging in other “unprotected” practices.
For one thing, peer to peer networks these days are riddled with spyware and viruses. You think you’re getting the newest John Mayer CD, and you might be...but you might also be downloading a trojan horse that silently steals your passwords.
Second, you might be wasting time and using bandwidth needlessly because you won’t get what you're after anyway. That’s because record companies have started “poisoning” the peer to peer networks with bogus files, or tracks that get garbled halfway through.
Third, the recording industry does in fact pursue illegal downloaders, and takes them to court. The fines can be enormous - starting at several hundred dollars PER VIOLATION. One track is one violation. As well, companies can be sued when their employees use their networks for downloading copyrighted materials.
How do I know all this? I’ve cleaned it off many a customer’s computer and seen the effects first hand.
Getting music online is very convenient - no trip to the mall, and you don’t have to buy a whole CD for one or two tracks. Fortunately, for today’s consumer there are legitimate and safe ways to get music online. For ease of use and quality, you can’t beat the iTunes store. No, it’s not free. It’s $1 per track or about $10 per album. But there are no risks, and you’re sure to get a quality product. Your tracks won’t have any hiccups, or be of different volume levels throughout the same album, as they might be if you piece together an album from a peer to peer network. And they’re nicely tagged with the correct artist, track numbers, album art, and so on. And you can easily burn them to an audio CD.
And (yeah, I know I said I wouldn’t go here) the artist receives fair compensation for his work.
1 comment:
One only has to look at the girl in the Midwest who was recently fined something like $100,000 for operating a P2P website out of her apartment! I don't remember all the details by the record industry went after her with a hammer the size of a Cadillac! And they made an example out of her. Besides, what do you need with all that stolen music when there is Garage Band!
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