There's a site that offers access to music online for free. Playlist.com, run by Project Playlist, Inc., claims over 37 Million users... That's a lot. None of them pay a cent for hundreds of thousands of songs. The RIAA, of course, sued back in May. Project Playlist is still running.
The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker based in sweden, serves over 100,000 daily users, providing access to an enormous amount of free, illegal content. The RIAA, MPAA, and EA games sued. The site still operates.
Both sites defend themselves from the law with one argument: "We don't GIVE them the music." This is true, to an extent. Both sites operate by linking the people with the music to the people who want it, and none of their servers contain illegal content.
Is this piracy on the websites' part? Not techically. Is it illegal? Yes- here's why: Conspiracy. It's the same reason getaway drivers go to jail, even if they didn't steal anything. These sites are instrumental in streamlining mass piracy on an unprecedented scale. (For example, AC/DC's new album, Black Ice, suffers about 10,000 downloads per hour)
So the remaining question is this: How do they get away with it? The answer was suddenly obvious: the numbers game. With the sites' legal protection currently locked in debate, there are just too many people involved. many of them are out of US (and by extension, the RIAA and MPAA) reach. And, to top it off, many have no idea that what they're doing is illegal. Playlist.com is similar in style to iTunes, which is considered legal. Nobody told them they were breaking the law. They just got free music. Facebook and MySpace support the site, and if anything makes a site legit, it's having facebook's endorsement.
So, while the lawyers keep billions of hypothetecal dollars in lockup, the music goes on.
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