This is what would be ideal: to share the thousands of songs in my iTUnes library by making my iTunes Library my Shared folder, or by making an alias of my iTunes library and putting it inside the official Shared Folder. Would that work? Has anyone tried it?

Here's what's NOT ideal: having duplicate copies of songs in my Shared FOlder and my iTunes library...talk about a drag on my computer.

Right now, I keep a very low number of music files in my Shared Folder (less than 300) as a pitiful attempt to save some memory. Plus, I feel bad that I can't share all my great music!

Maybe this is a related question: how come most people just have a small number of songs in their Shared folder? Is it like me, they are squeezed on memory, or what? Is there something negative about sharing thousands of songs? Surely most of us have thousands of music files, not dozens or hundreds. I'm afraid this sounds naive, but I have read your FAQ upside down and I can't figure this out.

Hi

To answer your questions in order:

you just add your iTunes Library to the list of shared files in Limewire Preferences.

thank you for being public spirited — Gnutella needs more people like you. Sadly, the majority of people don't care how many files they offer for sharing so long as they have what they want.

if you are based in America, I draw your attention to the recently settled case in which four students each paid about $17,000 agreed damages to the RIAA for offering large numbers of files for downloading. The RIAA is trying to persuade the ISPs to disclose the names and addresses of private users. Should that protective wall of confidentiality break, all large sharers become vulnerable and, unless you want to have the fun of defending your own civil case, perhaps small would then be beautiful.

I am MILITANTLY public spirited, but yes, I understand your point about not wanting to attract the attention of litigators. What I would like to get a straight answer about is, how many is TOO many? Is 500 files too much, a 1000, 5,000? I know there's no rule, it's all a cat and mouse game, but I would like a general idea. My sense of browsing other people's files is that they seem to be under 500, and always under 1000.

Also, I'm not a student who's fighting the university administration on top of everything else. I'm the "middleaged mom" that people don't even think has a clue about sharing music.

But back to tech question: once my iTunes library gets hashed once thru, is it "done" and won't take as long in the future? Or do I have to leave my sharing software on ALL THE TIME? This is actually a sep. question, I know, but a mysterious one to me. Am I starting from scratch everytime I open LimeWire or Acquisition or whatever?

Hi

If you want to discuss general question of copyright, e-mail me directly. This forum is supposed to be more technical. I can assure you there are many people out there with more than 1,000 files available for sharing. You just haven't hit them yet.

Hashing is necessary everytime you are starting Limewire from "new", ie you "restarted" or shut down your machine. But, if you Quit Limewire to use other applications and then come back to it or "Sleep" your machine, Limewire should restart without having to rehash.

And the latest set of statistics I read on usage showed that Moms are becoming the largest users of time on the net, albeit more for e-mail and chat than P2P but it's only a matter of time before Moms rule the world (assuming they're not already in charge and nobody told me yet).