Originally posted by: Darth Chaltab
I'm a bit weird in that morally I don't think it's right to download music that I don't already own in some way

That strikes me as kind of silly. I mean you don't pay for the radio, and back in the day a lot of people would make cassette recording of their favourite songs from the radio (remember doing that? I do!)--downloading to me is not a whole lot different. A lot of musicians make their music available for free nowadays. Its really only the big record labels that are all up in moral arms--and the entire reason is because its the record executives who get profit from CD sales. They screw most of their clients and keep most of the profit for themselves, which is why it is at the pressure of major recor label executives that the RIAA and such started taking action. In fact, in Canada when blank media (CD's, cassettes) came out, the Canadian recording association put a small fee (ie 2 cents per CD) on all recordable media in order to protect against losses, so really we already have paid them the licencing fees; I remember this was a big deal way back when because their greed ended up giving users a legal loophole but I don't know if they changed this.