h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The big issue here is who owns the song. If i've bought 200 cd's, each with 1 or 2 songs on it that I like, then it should be just as legal for be to burn those 10-20 songs per cd onto recordable cd's. This is currently illegal, as in fact it is for me to record them onto audio tape.
The recording industry has to face up to the fact that F.A.C.T. (the Federation Against Copyright Theft) is based on a fault assumption, that every copy of a song out there that was not bought direct from the record company on some compilation where you don't like most of the songs is costing their members money.
If I want to get ALL of the good songs off those 200 cd's that I have paid good money for, and compile them into a much smaller collection for use in my in-car cd multi-changer, I should not have to pay them a copying tax. It is also tedious doing it. This is where napster came in, as you could download from other people copies of the mp3 files that they had made from those same cd's that they also had bought.
File shareing is SO USEFULL that it is not going away. hence the production of gnutella. This is FREE software that enables file sharing without there being any central napster-ish body to sue.
NOTE: I am not advocating stealing from the artist (I already bought the songs). I could rip them off the cd's, make them into mp3's and burn them onto suitable cd's. but why should some record producer worrying about all that money he never had any chance of getting from me have the right to say that I should not do this.

I thought gnutella closed down..

As it is a file sharing program that works with anyone else online, and is distributed, how can it?

Mmmmm yeah, good point.

I just remember seeing something on the website a few months ago. It was in big letters with lots of apology saying they had shut down because of heavy legal stuff.
Seems okay now though.

I'd also heard that Scour Exchange was shut down for the same reasons - but it looks like it's coming back, new-and-"improved", and "legal", too.