Hey,
Here is an e-mail I recently received that you may be interseted
in. If you would like to express your opinons about it you can go to
the Eminem Forum at http://www.delphi.com/eminem1:

"Dear Music Fan:

I am writing to you in regards to an issue that is becoming a hot
topic on
the Internet, and to provide you with a simple explanation of the
controversy between the company www.mp3.com and the RIAA. I am sure
that
you have heard of or at least visited the website www.mp3.com. If you
do
not know, the RIAA are the people that represent the record labels in
(among
other things) government issues such as the freedom of speech and
copyright,
and certify gold and platinum records.

Right now, the 2 are in engaged in a dispute about www.mp3.com's
method of
providing the music services "Instant Listening" and "Beam-It" on the
Internet to us, the fans. You can read both views on this issue at
their
sites. For your purposes as a fellow music fan I would like to give
you my
take on what the story is, in plain English. I do not want you to
think
that my view is the right one, I want you to go to the sites and make
your
own judgment, (the RIAA's is at
http://www.riaa.com/tech/press/022500.htm,
MP3.com's is at http://www.mp3.com in the news section). As a
tastemaker
in the Pop music world, I feel that this is worth your while to check
this
out.

In the beginning days of www.mp3.com, fans would go to the site and
sign up
to listen to music by independent artists as free music downloads,
otherwise
known as MP3's. This was and still is a great concept, but as more
bands
added their songs (there's 20,000 now I think), it became harder for
the
average person to find good music. Fans wanted to get music from
popular
artists they heard on the radio and saw on MTV, which were
infrequently on
MP3.com. In an effort to provide this, MP3.com created two new music
services called "Instant Listening" and "Beam-It."

With Instant Listening, a fan signs up with my.MP3.com, and customized
version of MP3.com, and creates their own account. When they are
buying
CDs from one of the online music stores that MP3.com is associated
with,
they can select an "Instant Listening" option. Choosing this adds the
CD
they're buying to their account at my.MP3.com. They still get the CD
in the
mail like normal. But now, they can go into their my.MP3.com account
and
MP3.com will stream back to them the CD they just purchased, so they
can
listen to it instantly. They can also use MP3.com's Beam-It service
to add
CDs they, or their friends, already have to their my.MP3.com account.
They
just put the CD into their CD-ROM drive and the Beam-It software
recognizes
the CD they have and adds that to their account.

So, the concept is that they can log in to their my.MP3.com with their
username and password from any computer anywhere and listen to their
music
that they bought at the store, or added through Beam-It, from
anywhere.

Here is what the problem is. The company www.mp3.com has you believing
that you actually uploaded your own music onto their server, when
actually
they went out and bought 45,000 of what they thought were the
most "popular"
CDs today and uploaded each of them, one-by-one into their server,
just like
you would do with your own CDs to your RealJukebox on your computer.
Problem is, they didn't get permission from people who own that music
(copyright holders, such as artists and record labels) to do this.

As you may know, you are able as a consumer to rip your CDs to your
computer and play them back to yourself. This is widely considered to
be a
"fair use" by the law. MP3.com, however, is not able to exercise your
fair
use right for you, because they are a company and not you. If they
want to
use music that belongs to others in a service that they provide, they
have
to get permission, by getting what is called a license.

By not getting a license and just using the music without permission,
they
are clearly infringing copyrights. This is no different than you
starting
to take all of the movies that you have bought in your life,
uploading them
to your website server, letting anyone who says they also own it
watch it,
and running banner ads to make money (or charge a fee directly), or
just
doing it for free. You see, all www.mp3.com did was buy those CDs in
the
store, just like you, and upload them into their server.

To put it real simply, www.mp3.com is making buckets of advertising
money
(and soon subscription money) off of you, me, the artists, and record
labels
for the price of one $17.00 CD, while the rest of the music and
entertainment industries do it the legal way and pay for the rights
to the
music they want to use.

I hope that this has made this clearer to you, believe me it took me
a while
to figure it out, but please read both sides of the story and make
your own
decision. Thanks for your time and for passing this along to any
others
that may be interested.

http://www.riaa.com/tech/press/022500.htm"

Joey