Wednesday, April 30, 2003

WSJ.com - The Mossberg Solution: Apple's New Service Beats Illegal Free Sites

WSJ.com - The Mossberg Solution: Apple's New Service Beats Illegal Free Sites "Why would you use Apple's store instead of bootleg services like Kazaa, where the songs are free? Well, on Kazaa, the songs can be hard to find, especially in the version you want. There's a lot of trial and error. Also, the quality can be poor, with pops and hissing and the endings cut off. There's no album art included. And lots of people using Kazaa have received viruses and spyware along with their music.
But, most of all, downloading songs from Kazaa is at the very least unethical, and probably illegal, because the people who upload the songs to those services don't own the copyrights, and don't pay anything to the artists or songwriters. With the Apple store, you do have to pay, but your conscience can be clear."

On a related note, in today's Boston Globe:
"The record industry opened a new front in its war against online piracy yesterday by surprising hundreds of thousands of Internet song swappers with an instant message warning that they could be ''easily'' identified and face ''legal penalties.''"

Expanded coverage of same story in today's NYT.

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