This is hard to explain, but bear with me. I have a playlist of webmusic. By this, I mean that for every song played, windows media player links to a mp3 file on the internet, and plays it. But to do this, it has to download the song to a temporary file on your computer.
Is it illegal to copy the song from that temporary file to a folder such as "my music"? Which part of this process is illegal?
You have to consider the site and see:
1.) Is the song/music copyrighted?
2.) Are they legally permitted to play the music online in the first place?
3.) Do they expressly forbid the downloading/saving of the songs in their terms of use/legal pages?
Name the site(s) and we can offer a little more insight.
John
Here's some of the links I used. Note that some of them might not be active anymore.
http://ia300233.us.archive.org/1/items/Beak_Myself/SomethingCoporateBeakMyself.mp3
http://www.xanga-music.com/Music/th%20starting%20line%20-%20nothings%20gonna%20stop%20us%20now.mp3
http://www.echolleykennels.homested.com/Green_Day_-_Time_of_Your_Life.mp3
http://www.uni-duba.ru/~bm/music/aerica/nickelback-howuremindme.mp3
http://www.hop.com/users/rchy_po/music/Fallout20boy-%20grand%20theft%20autumn.mp3
Hopefully those 5 are enough.
First I checked out those websites and found that archive.org states that access "is granted for scholarship and research purposes only." The others don't seem to have any clear guidelines listed.
Then I looked into the songs themselves. Combined they have won over two dozen awards, they all appear to be copyrighted, and I found 4/5 of them for sale on Amazon. I didn't find any 'free download' links on the authors' respective websites, so as far as I can tell their free distribution through the sites you listed is prohibited.
I may be wrong, but personally I'd delete the playlists as they don't appear to be legal streams, let alone downloads.
John
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