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Who here uses Kazaa or something like it? Bet you do. That's illegal you kno. Hah. I love arguments that record companies have over illegal downloading of music. It's funny because they winge so much about it, even though most of them have the swazzy house and plenty of dosh in the first place.

I should probably point out that i'm only giving my views, so that some lawyer can't come outta nowhere and bust my ass. But most people have the opinion, what's the whole big deal about it?? All this illegal stuff has been going on for years. When casettes were the hype from the 70's, people just went round to each other's houses and recorded other casettes onto blank ones. I have plenty of old casettes which have just been recorded straight off other people's. So what?, people say nowadays.

Then bring along CD's, pretty much the same thing happened with them. First there was the easy way of copying CD's on PC's, the record companies got round that one by protecting the discs. But after that came ripping, where you could put each track of a CD onto your PC within a minute or so. Excellent, people say. I can't really remember whether anything was done about that, perhaps a few warning messages were sent out to scare people..

Ripping of CD's led to Mp3, and of course, Napster. Napster ruled supreme until Lars Ulrich and his band of rich merry bitchers got it shut down(I'll touch on that later). So then everyone went to Audiogalaxy, which was also pretty good. Same thing happened to it. The major player today is of course Kazaa, which cannot be shut down due to it having thousands of servers, so the music is spread out all over the place. Even though becuase of I.P addresses the risk of getting a lawsuit against you is greater, more and more people have turned to stuff like this. Last summer (2003) Kazaa hit it's 320 millionth download. That's insane, as that is about a twentith of the world's population.

2004 has seen an increase in the number of 'legal' downloading sites, such as the reformed Napster. Kazaa has seen a decrease in users, but this is only becuase people are now using smaller download services. The general trend is still that people don't like the ones that you pay for, probably because 1. it's not free. Also you get a track limit, there is less of a selection, you can't rip onto CD's, and the mp3's are all protected in some way.

All i'm doing is putting in most people opinions about the whole thing. In my opinion, i don't rekon record companies should worry as much, they should just ignore it. After all, people do still buy CD's; they are more attractive, make you feel less of a cheapskate and dont have crappy dud mp3's on them. Oh yea, i said i'd touch on Lars Ulrich. He's the drummer for Metallica. He chose not to ignore the whole thing, took Napster to court, got it shut down, and totally destoryed his band's street cred in doing so. The ironic thing is that the only reason Metallica broke through in the 80's was because they traded illegal tapes throughout the underground scene. I like Metallica, i've payed 40 odd and motored down to Dublin just to see them, but Lars just did a stupid thing there... Oh, and their streed cred has recovered, as this guy said he didn't care anymore about a year later.

Madonna fairly got herself into a shambles too. This one is funny. In a message to the youth who downloaded her music illegaly, she gave them the message "What the f**k do you think you're doing?? Overnight, a hacker responded, hacked her website and uploaded her entire new unrealeased album for free download. He also left the message: "This is what the f**k i think i'm doing!!" haha.

Then there's Radiohead. They ignored the whole thing, and nothing happened to them.

I'm done with posting about all this now. That took ages :|