I understand that the RIAA has done some good in protecting artist's and recording company's rights to profit from their creations, but I really have gotten tired of hearing them complain about how much money they're losing. Did they ever stop to compute how much the music consumer has lost? When I replace an LP or cassette with a CD, do I get a special deal for the "upgrade". No such luck. They tax all MD blanks, assuming that I will use them *only* for copying copyrighted material, of which I do some, but I also make much use of my MD to make voice recordings of my relatives for a genealogical project. These are the ways that I have lost money to the RIAA. Although I've never had a reason to defeat SCMS yet, but I don't feel to bad about owning a CO3 (mainly for conversion from/to AES/EBU) or a digital sound card, knowing that I have the capability to circumvent their barrier if I even need to. I don't feel bad about owning a Spressa CDRW, that does not require audio CDRs to which the RIAA's tax has been added. (Most of the CD's I write are data, anyway.) To be honest, I've downloaded some great tracks from the "starving artists" section of MP3.com because they have a lot of stuff which is not available at record stores. Its somewhat of a production to download, decode and record to MD or write to CD. I've never downloaded from Napster, because the vast majority of what is available there is also available at local record stores (or CDNOW, for that matter). I find it easier and achieve better results (than with the highly variable encoding quality of many MP3s) if I just buy the CD and copy off the tracks I like. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
