What exactly is illegal downloading of music?

Question

What exactly is illegal downloading of music? If i download purely songs from sites such as multiply, isohunt.com, gendou.com , is it counted as illegal downloading?

I'm not paying to download but the site owner pays to host the web and the music files.

However, in sites such as isohunt.com, we're downloading the files we want in torrent files which often don't tell us where this source come from, is it illegal or not, we don't know.

And what will happen if we're caught downloading these illegal stuffs? Is there a difference in punishment if i'm only downloading songs while the other guy is downloading movies ?

Is there anyway to erase our track from downloading music/ movie/ stuffs like this ?

Answer 1

In the United States (ONLY) there is a law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act which makes it illegal to download mucsic. Everywhere else it is not illegal but sometimes considered infringement of copyright, and sometimes not; in the countries where it is not, it is considered the worst thing to make a song 'available' that is; allow other people to download it off you. You could be arrested for that.

Bottom line;

If you are in the United States of America: Downloading music is illegal.

If you are in Australia or pretty much any other countries: Downloading isn't, but allowing other people to download off YOU on p2p is.

In any country where it's not illegal, a record company can recover it's costs off you in a lawsuit. If you download an mp3 file, it is probably one track off a CD of sixteen tracks. In Australia a CD of sixteen tracks is about $20.00. Twenty divided by sixteen is 1.25 so if you download a track off a p2p network Sony BMG could sue you for $1.25 minus taxes or whatever.

The same applies for movies or anything else.

Answer 2

Depending on the sophistication of the library's computer staff, it's possible they "identify" each computer that connects to it by recording your computer's unique MAC address (this is hardware, and is different for every computer). If they do this and the authorities come after them, they could then identify you by tracing your MAC address (MAC is short for Media Access Control, by the way). Even if your library isn't that sophisticated, if the authorities detect illegal downloading, they could simply come down on the library, which could result in fines and lack of access for *everybody* using the library. Not nice, not fun.

Answer 3

If you don't pay...it is illegal.