Internet Downloads

[Alarick]

Perhaps it is accepted as 'legal', but it is not.  As soon as you give one copy away to a friend you have infringed on the rights of the artist to profit from that copy.
It is illegal to distribute 1 copy, 100 copies, or 1000+ copies.  There is no grey area.
Still illegal.
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The information I could find is out of the law writings of the Copyright law.

The right a copyright owner has includes the right

to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.

However, note that no where is the phrase "transfer of ownership" actually defined, and in legal speak, this may not include the process of giving it to someone else with no cost and not expectation of anything in return. They do define "financial gain" officially, but not "transfer of ownership," and as I'm not a lawer, I don't know the implications of this lack of definition.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that the law is sufficiently grey that one could make a case saying that, without financial gain, copies may or may not be 100% illegal or legal. The law is not well definied in respect to non-financial situations and situations involving "close family."

I do realize that this is a poor argument, and am not saying I believe it to be 100% reliable. However, it does point out some of the problems with the law.

The law is crystal clear, but there is only one way to truly enforce it - we must as individuals enforce it on ourselves.
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The law is far from crystal clear. As stated before, the fair use statutes just in the few paragraphs they contain are among the least clear laws that exist. They essentially say that you can use a copyrighted work if it's for a "fair" purpose. In particular, it's possible for a teacher to make copies of songs to give to the students for a class, and this could fall under the fair use clause.

The other problems with the law are that, first, the actual idea of copyright is something "made up" and have a bearing only on US hearings, and second, the law is dependant on the copyright owner pressing charges.
A copyright is "granted" as soon as a piece is created, and all one has to do is show that they created it first. Filing the copyright with the government only makes it "official" and allows it to be on record right away, so you can use that filing as proof. To further complicate the situation, a piece of music is copyrighted both in the actual music, and further in each specific recording of the song. The owners of these can be different people, too. In a situation where a recording of a song is played publically, there is little to determine which of the copyright owners of these two copyrights is the one that has the right to file charges.

In addition, because the law is based on the idea that it only grants the right for the copyright owner to file charges if he or she chooses, it leaves the question of whether something is really legal up in the air. Many artists want their work copied and shared to a small degree. How is the user supposed to know which pieces are legal and which are not? How is the user supposed to know if something advertised as "open source" truely is open source? These issues are not handled by the law.

All I want to point out is that the law is not well done, and in many cases it needs to be completely overhauled. In the current digital age, the long length of copyrights and the ability to transfer them means that pieces of software are literally being destroyed because no one has the right to keep an official back up, even if there is no company that exists to support it.