Remember back in the good ol’ days, when you were cool if you had the CD player with the rhinestones on it or the newest 98 Degrees album? How did we enhance our music collection then? Oh yeah, you had to buy CDs. Even if you only wanted that hit single off the album, you had to purchase the whole thing, in its $15-$20 entirety. Good times. (Although we didn’t really buy them anyway…) Nowadays, you’re the coolest if you have the most megabytes in your iPod Touch or over 10,000 songs in your iTunes. If everyone used the iTunes store to purchase those songs, they would be spending roughly $10,000. That’s not so cool. We are in the age of technology here, so I’m sure we can come up with another way to acquire the music we want without breaking the very small bank we teenagers have, and we did! Well not us, but someone in the 90s did when a website leaked out that allowed you to download all your favorite music for free. Since then, many different music download sites have become popular, and everyone seems to have their own preference about the best one. Is this concept too good to be true though? It might be for some. Some of the most popular music download programs are Limewire, Frostwire, and Torrent databases like isoHunt and Mininova. There is a huge difference between programs like Limewire and Torrents: Limewire will copy the music files from anyone who might have a file that was searched for, or even just something close to it. Torrents download directly from a database, which makes bigger files like whole albums and movies a lot easier to manage. Although this may seem very cut and dry, there are gray areas to all of this, and that’s where the illegal part comes in. Defraud and infringement of copyright law: what does that even mean? Basically, it means that the right of owning these song files is being deprived of the owner by everyone who downloads them. If you don’t own the rights to the music, and you didn’t buy it from someone who did, it’s illegal. Another part to throw in is the sharing of files; if a purchase is not made, it is considered a violation of copyright law. Music artists, being the official owners of their own creations, are hurt from all of this file sharing. If their new CD is already leaked all over the Internet, who is going to go to the trouble to buy the whole album? I know I’m not. All of this should be taken into account next time you are searching for that perfect mariachi band music for a Spanish video, or any other type of music you might need for the thousands of video projects you do while attending FHS. Is this file-stealing actually going to get any of us into trouble? In most cases, no. Organizations like the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, like to check up on some of these sites every now and then, preying on some ambitious music-lover that may have downloaded one too many Michael Jackson hits in the past year. They’ll get slammed with thousands of dollars of fines to pay, but this is only to scare the rest of the world into thinking that they could get slammed as well. For now, I think you’re safe. Still, think before you download the next Jay Sean hit – you might as well be taking money right out of his pocket.