Re:Big Bad MP3 Sharer (sp?) (Score 1)

#2 is special interest to the question of piracy, concerning the songs that we hear on the radio. I'm going to expound on this point specifically. 2a) Consumers and record buyers are often denied access to the songs played on the radio and television. Those mixes are generally not available on albums or through online distribution networks. Generally, this doesn't seem like a problem. However: often you will notice that radio versions and television versions often have added content, or are mixed differently, with no referrence tag. How many times, on a video or on the radio, do they refer to that song being a " mix" of the track? Record companies are effectively lying to consumers, because of the situation described in #2 of the above post: you buy the CD, to find out that the song is mixed dfferently than you heard on the radio, often to the point where it is near a new song. Sean 'Puffy' Combs is famous for this (or, rather, was), as well as most of the major teen-group and pop-rock producers. It works down to false advertising by the record companies, and without P2P or any check mechanism, there is no way for the consumer to verify what is going on. What is important is not that they are removing the ability to retrieve pirated material, but that they are removing the main avenue of the consumer to keep tabs on their social contract with the record company. As for the morality of running such a community, I would certainly mark you as valid. Legally, it is questionable (I have no idea what bands/record labels you have up there). As far as I know, the new law does apply to you.