hi everyone,
i am new to the LimeWire software, i found out about it after i too was ripped off by a certain p2p network.
when registering for the basic version, i came across the copyright laws, i read them but didnt really understand them.
now whenever i try to download a file it always comes up sayin that we couldnt find a license for this product please follow your local copyright laws or something similar. I always choose to ignore this and download the file anyway.
can someone explain to me about the copyright issue and if im doing the right thing
Thank you very much for your time.........

Pointguard

I, like you, live in the UK and I am aware that UK laws, even the simplest of them, are very complex, especially now that we have to take account of EU legislation as well. And, as you can imagine, copyright laws are just as difficult as anything else on the statute books to interpret and understand.

So therefore, Hyper-kun is correct when he says that it is far more difficult than just the simplistic "it is illegal to download copyrighted material". For example, you can download singles from the Tesco.com website at 79 pence each quite legally but it would be illegal if you freely downloaded those same songs using a P2P app. However, downloading via P2P in itself is not illegal, you can download illegally using your browser as well, it's just that you have to be careful what you download. And likewise, you can freely download some copyright materials as long as you agree to abide by certain restrictions.

Nevertheless, if you want a simple explanation of what you can and should not do then the following, though not strictly accurate, should help:

If you can download something, e.g. books, music, pictures, etc. for free when they can and should be bought then that is illegal.

Basically, you are depriving the copyright owner of the monetary rewards that he/she is legally entitled to as recompense for his/her work.

Finally, you can search on Google for UK Copyright Laws, I am sure you will find, in your search results, some interesting though difficult reading.



UK Bob

ok thanks for the explanation bobby.
so i can continue downloading songs through LimeWire as long as i don't distribute them and pass them off as my own?
thanks

so exactly how do I find and download files that are perfectly fine to download onto my computer?
thanks again (and thank you for the very quick response)

"Downloading files protected by copyright laws in your country is illigal !"

That's nonsense and not true in any country I know of.

Well i'm in england, and can you tell me how to download files without copyright laws on them? (check my first post to find out the message which comes up"
thanks

Again, there is no such thing as "illegal by default". Do you think nobody has a copyright on the Linux kernel? A lot of people do. The same applies to virtually any free software. There is also software which is free (as in beer) but not open-source, yet the authors still have the copyrights.

There is *a lot* of free (as in beer) music available all over the internet. The artists nonetheless have the copyrights on those unless they explicitely dedicate their work to the public domain.

It is *not* possible to know beforehand whether something you download is given away for free or whether someone is uploading it without permission. I have no idea why people would voluntary dumb this down to "it is illegal to download copyrighted material" unless they have some interest that people believe in this view. There has been *a lot* of lobbying and brain-washing since Napster. Many things that were perfectly legal in 2000 are either illegal now or have been pushed into a grey area where it depends on the exact case.

Maybe it's just that people have a hard time if they cannot stick to simple rules or they just cannot believe that there isn't a (simple) solution for everything. If there was, for example, spam wouldn't exist anymore. Of course, you can simply declare all file transfers illegal. There's your simple solution.