Is Downloading Music Legal/ Understanding Copyright

      Sharing music from an Mp3 happens all the time and is very popular. Yes, Mp3 is legal, but it often misleads people. What is illegal is unauthorized copying of music. You can make a copy of the CD for your own personal use but may not give that copy to someone else. Whether is is sold or given away, it still violates the Copyright Law. So to put it simply, you need to pay for your tracks or songs. For example, pirating a movie. Lets say you rented Mission Impossible for the night. You really enjoyed it and would like to watch it again when you get home from work tomorrow. Sadly, the movie is due before 8 o'clock and you don't get off work until 9:00. So you whip out your video camera and re-tape the entire movie. Your extremely happy with it and invite some friends over to watch it with you. Once the movie is over your friend wants to borrow it. So you let him and don't think anything of it. You just violated the Copyright law severely. To distribute that copy to another person you must have the permission of the original owners. In other words its basically stealing. Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the U.S. to the creators of "original works" including videos, music, literary works, photographs, paintings etc.