If we're not allowed to so called "pirate" anything, then what is the point of even having limewire because everything is copyrighted. What can i download and still be in accordance with limewire's guidlines?

What kind of content are you looking for Sonrienta?

There's lots of non-infringing content (grrr--makes me irritable that some people think there isn't) and finding it is much of the fun of using LimeWire. Too, the new betas are supporting more searches for licensed material.

Infringing content usually is tied to well-publicized keywords, so discovering effective non-popular keywords is an interesting game. On the other hand, obscure keywords can reveal private or even shocking content. If you search outside mainstream keywords, be prepared for surprises.

Peerless could better tell you how to search for indy music.

For images, search for "dsc .jpg" or similar default digital still camera file names. Once you find some someone sharing those, browse them to find more and see what other keywords work. "Wallpaper" is also a common keyword here. Caution though: "amateur" will turn up lots of porn.

For video, if you stay away from popular movie names, you should be OK.

For text, start with the keyword of authors who died before the early 20th century (Shakespeare is a good example here).

Anything from www.magnetmix.com is legit, so that's another place to start.

Other ways to find obscure keywords are the "what's new" type searches and double-clicking curious keywords on the "incoming searches" on the Monitor page (really only works if you are an ultrapeer and have discovered how to activate the incoming search display).

In short: find and use obscure keywords (the autogenerated spam is easy to spot with a bit of experience) and browse hosts that share files that don't use popular keywords in the filenames.

I'm looking mostly for music of all kinds. I do really enjoy old Marx Brother's movies and things that are hard to find like old radio shows. But the crackdown lately on downloading anything that has a copyright has me scared. bye buying limewire isn't that like paying the copyright fees?

LimeWire is free (there are scam sites who are pretty good at misleading people into thinking they are paying for copyrighted content).

The Pro version of LimeWire contributes to the development of the LimeWire project, and has nothing to do with the content that can be found using LimeWire.

Buying a car doesn't automatically get you a free pass into a drive-in movie

I know what you mean by the copyright confusion: the laws are an international mess and courts around the world are trying to deal with the pressure from copyright cartels. The rules change almost weekly. p2p is so powerful at allowing peers to share with each other that the old distribution models are trying to control it any way they can (with pretty poor results).

Anyway, Peerless knows much more about finding good music.

Cheers

Okay, so i shouldn't be paranoid about downloading completely random stuff, just the popular stuff? I do have the Paid version of limewire, so they have all my information. I just think it's crazy that all this stuff has to be crazy like this. I wonder if anyone has bothered to look at the sales of Videos, CD's and Dvd's prior to the surge in P2P file sharing. Seriously though, people who really like a movie or cd are going to go buy it anyway and the people who are going to copy it are going to find some other way around it. It's how it is. I just worry about things ever since that poor kid got busted for downloading nursery rhymes from a file sharing program to use for a community service project. what a sad state of humanity