>>http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101026/music_nm/us_limewire_music_ruling
>>
>>oooh this is going to make such a huge difference to music sharing on the internet...it's all over!
>>Well I guess now people will have to learn to use torrents.
>
>My older daughter is off to college this fall. She says one of the adjustments she has had to make is Limewire is blocked on the college network.
>
>Not to defend all the practices of the music industry, but I have always considered free downloads stealing. A generation has grown up thinking music is free. That model is unsustainable.

Despite what the record labels want you to believe - copyright infringement is NOT theft.
Copyright owners frequently refer to copyright infringement as "theft". In law copyright infringement does not refer to actual theft, but an instance where a person exercises one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner without authorization. Courts have distinguished between copyright infringement and theft, holding, for instance, in the United States Supreme Court case Dowling v. United States (1985) that bootleg phonorecords did not constitute stolen property and that "...interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright... 'an infringer of the copyright.'" In the case of copyright infringement the province guaranteed to the copyright owner by copyright law is invaded, i.e. exclusive rights, but no control, physical or otherwise, is taken over the copyright, nor is the copyright owner wholly deprive of using the copyrighted work or exercising the exclusive rights owned. (from wikipeida of course)

As for the 'music is free" model being unsustainable - I disagree. It won't work for the record labels of course - but for the musicians it will. They will just have to find other avenues of generating $ other than record sales...like doing live performances or doing some marketing like what KISS has done for 30+ years. People will probably always buy music even if there are ways of getting it for free - probably not as much of course - and people will only buy an album once. For example - I bought two 8 tracks of Boston's "Don't Look Back" album (because one wore out) - four cassettes (because they wore out), two record albums (cause I wanted one untouched), and one CD! You think I'm gonna pay for it again? I DON'T THINK SO. I'll copy my CD to a hard-drive and when the CD get's scratched I'll just make another one. What I would do is go to one of their concerts though - and I'll buy a t-shirt or two while I'm there and perhaps some other stuff if it looks neat.