US Fed Gov. Says All Music Downloads Are Theft

***wraggster*** · August 27th, 2009, 20:20

Nearly all US government employees and contractors are subject to mandatory annual information security briefings. This year the official briefing flatly states that all downloaded music is stolen. The occasionally breathless tone of the briefing and the various minor errors contained therein are funny but the real eye-opener is a 'secure the building' exercise where employees stumble across security problems and resolve them. According to the material, the correct response to an employee who is downloading music is to shout 'That's stealing!' No mention is made of more-free licenses, public domain works, or any other legitimate download. If this were a single agency or department that had made a mistake in their training material it might not be so shocking. But this is a government-wide training package that's being absorbed by hundreds of thousands of federal employees, both civilian and military. If you see a co-worker downloading music, they're stealing. Period. Who woulda thunk it? Somebody should mirror this. Who wants to bet that copies will become hard to find if clued-in technogeeks take notice and start making noise?"
Warning: this site gives a whole new meaning to "Flash heavy.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/08/...oads-Are-Theft

**VampDude** · August 28th, 2009, 15:56

The only FREE music I've downloaded is from people who say it's okay to do so (independent/unsigned artists)... Otherwise I pay 12 cents (7 British pennies) per song, which nobody can say is stolen.

I have no idea why people don't pay, when you can download and own a 10 track album for $1.22 or 74p.

**Eviltaco64** · August 28th, 2009, 19:23

Piracy laws are a little weird, to be honest.

It's perfectly legal to record a song off the radio in it's entirety, but illegal to download the same song off a P2P client.

I guess the tape recording could be considered "original content" since you may hear the DJ.

Some places on the internet (like YouTube) have similar laws where a video is a lot more likely to be deleted if it just has the album artwork as a picture.

However, if you upload a song with lyrics as the video or an AMV using copyrighted material, it tends to remain untouched.

**VampDude** · August 29th, 2009, 21:55

You can upload anything to YouTube... I made this $#@!ty looking video two years ago and uploaded it, the entire song too... It has the album cover, but I somehow surpassed the thing of just the album cover?

I'm guessing the if you give credit where it's due, nobody minds... Sometimes it helps the sales or even promotes the artist when a fan uploads a video with just the song and a picture.