Free Music Downloads: The Confusing Legal Scenario

Everyone likes to have something free. However it becomes a bit confusing when it comes to the free music downloads. It is in fact one of the gray areas where the barrier between legal and illegal becomes thin and quite confusing. As Fred Von Lohman, one of the leading lawyers in Electronic Frontier Foundation says “It is a gray area; there has never been a court case covering it. I would argue it’s fair use. I am willing to admit a court might see it differently.”

There could be no better summing of the situation that exists in the realm of free music downloads today. In fact the rule is rather blurry in nature and chances are also fewer that you would be zinged. Most egregious cases are pursued by both the Recording Industry Association of America as well as other record companies. They get hundreds of copyrighted songs for downloading. In case of a woman who had more than 1000 songs in her shared directory, the association sued for only 24 songs. Thus instead of suing for the entire load, they sued her just over a portion.

Some of the free music downloads are obviously legitimate. Apple’s iTunes that helped popularizing the downloading and paid downloading for that has developed the system of giving away one song by the new artist per week. Others like the Starbucks stores, Amazon sites offer free downloads on MP3 pages. Similarly there is the Artistdirect website that offers around 200 freed downloads. MP3 provides free downloads. There are also multiple smaller labels that provide and give away music.

Many other sources for free, legal download besides individual levels. However you require the services of a reliable and efficient website that will help you get all the information on the free music downloads without getting involved into any legal hassles. Some of the sites help you decide how you use the free downloads so that you do not get involved into any legal problems. Whether it is for personal use or for commercial use, they may have large database. For instance the Creative Commons is one such site that has a database of nearly one million songs and they are listed as well. The only restriction is that you can used and download them for personal use or sampling but not for commercial uses.

Method that could be really trouble free is recording the songs you desire to have from the Internet radio. Of course nothing could be 100% perfect. But the chances are that the legal problems would be minimized in such cases. According to some lawyers the recording of digital music from Internet Radio is not prohibited under Home Recording Act of 1992 while others hold a contrary view. The area of legality in free music downloads is really confusing.