Is Kazaa still illegal?

If your not paying for a membership to download music then it is illegal. If I am not mistaken the only legal ones are the ones that you pay a monthly service for it. Do a google search on music download. MTV, Walmart, and Amazon have legal downloads. It ranges from like .99 a song to like 20.00 a month.

iTunes by apple is a pretty good one. They have a wide variety of songs. They are $.99 each. They offer specials sometimes for free songs and such.

Kazaa as owned by sharman networks is a pay for use service and yes it is somehow legal as are all the other so called "above board companies(itunez, Rolling Stone etc.).

The problem that they haven't solved is that they are collecting money for each artist based on what is downloaded. Last year, I-Tunes turned up with several million dollars in paid service thay neither they nor th elabels know how to allocate.

So when you download Muddy Waters, does Back Street boys get compensated? When you download Ray Charles, are you giving money to Britney Spears? Nobody kbows how to allocate the funds so they are sitting in limbo, but at least nobody is STEALING anything here, uh sorta.

As for bands I manage, they have no issue with people trading music, it's what makes people stars and gets music heard when not owned by the US giants, which no artist benefits from.

I you should feel com[pelled to get substandard quality downloaded music instead of buying a disk and getting the package, then by all means use Kazaa or I-tunes, or even NAPSTER for that matter, just don't get the false impression that you are giving something back to the artist who made the music, nobody has seen any money yet.

Kazaa, in itself, is not illegal. It is illegal to use Kazaa to
download media which you have not purchased. It's perfectly
fine to download the Kazaa application. It's perfectly fine to run
it and connect to remote servers. It's not OK to download music
and other media illegally.

I'd recommend Apple's iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes) as
a solution. You can (100% legally) download songs for 99?
apiece or albums for around $9.99. Nice setup.

If you use Kazaa to rummage through other shared nodes and download music with out paying for it either through a membership or by the song, you run the risk of being caught, charged and fined.

They are going after people in a big way. Rumor is that they have a setup in the shared mode. They monitor the downloads and record the tcpip address. Then they cut you a new one.

Fines to individuals have exceeded $10,000.

They have raided the Kazaa's parent company. Read it here.

http://tinyurl.com/28y4g

Stay safe stay legal. Big Brother is watching.

Good Luck Lee

It is still legal in Canada illegal in the US unless you are paying for the subscription. But if you are paying for the subscription you are better off going to Amazon or someplace similar since you know that the downloads are going to work for you.

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