Need input please

[railroadgrrl]

Okies, I'll try to make a long story short. I made my site poolpassion.com for a few friends of mine to link to for pictures and such for online pool tourneys. I went against my better judgement and made a wav page. The songs that I had up were for linking to for those tourneys, I own the 100 or so songs that I had up there and took them from my cds and compressed them into mp's and wavs. Don't rag me on this please, hind sight IS 20/20.

Anyway, someone other then this little group of friends wanted to link to my site for files and I politely said no, and they agreed. Yesterday I recieved my first notice that I had almost exceeded my bandwidth. Shocker, since I had never been over 300 MB total since the inception in October. I looked at my stats and noticed that I had been linked to..... two of the webs largest mp3 leechers associations, SOOOOOOO I promptly went in and deleted the whole lot.

Long story short, I am now disabled. What I would like to know is how long should I wait to reactivate my account and is there a time limit? I also have purchased Dreamweaver and would like to get rid of Frontpage, if I do this will I be able to ban ip's through the htaccess with dreamweaver? I am very disenchanted at this point.

Thank for the input
Micki aka RailroadGrrl

[BerksWebGuy]

You can contact support@powweb.com to enable your site again. You can deny IP's using .htaccess as well as referrers.

[Jade Dragon]

Originally posted by railroadgrrl , I own the 100 or so songs that I had up there and took them from my cds and compressed them into mp's and wavs. Don't rag me on this please, hind sight IS 20/20.

Thank for the input
Micki aka RailroadGrrl [/B]

Please note that even if you own the CD you do not own the copyrights to that music. So unless you have permission from the owners of those songs you cannot distribute them over the web via mp3 downloads.

That would be against Powwebs TOS and against the law for copyright infringement.

just a FYI

:)
Jade

[railroadgrrl]

Thanks Berks, good to hear that.

[Chase]

That's the problem with MP3... you do have the right to transfer the file if you own the CD.

However, you are right still because if you do transfer it, you theoretically have to transfer your right to that liscense.

You can have as MANY copies of anything you've paid for a liscense providing that you a) don't utilize more than one of the copies at a time (including lending to a friend and listening to the backup yourself and b) don't use them for "public performance"

Which brings me to streaming. You have every right to broadcast music that you've purchased, as long as you meet certain requirements... such as not using more than one work from a particular artist in a three hour period and so forth and so on.

If you really wanna push it... you could give an MP3 collection of a CD you bought to 100 people, and it SHOULD be legal (As read by the laws i'm familiar with at least) as long as you don't all utilized the 'backups' at one time. Keep in mind you'd have to designate these as "backup" #1, #2, #3... and so on and claim that you have designated these parties to hold them for you. That way it's them violating the law if they listen to it ;-)


Overall... ummm... either just keep your cd in the cdplayer, cuz unless you're a big site (or being ripped off as in your case) nobody cares about your efforts to provide the world with great music. So if you REALLY want to, get the rights :-)


EDIT: I left out the law that was created back in the days of VHS giving limited rights to the recipient of a "broadcast" to have dubbed/recorded copies of that transmission, but only because most of the webcasters are broadcasting illegally anyway, so why fight for the rights of the user, when they received it from someone acting illegally anyway?

[mjp]

Originally posted by BeenBusted
You have every right to broadcast music that you've purchased, as long as you meet certain requirements... such as not using more than one work from a particular artist in a three hour period and so forth and so on. I assume that by "so forth and so on" you mean paying the licensing fees to BMI or ASCAP? You do not have the right to broadcast, "narrowcast" or otherwise disseminate any copyrighted musical work without paying the appropriate licensing fees. Even jukebox owners pay licensing fees to BMI/ASCAP. There is no gray area here.

[Chase]

Let me clarify.

In that quote I was addressing those who DO broadcast legally, and the majority of broadcasters no longer run their own servers last I checked, and most of the "dedicated broadcasting servers" as I'll call them already take care of the liscensing information, leaving users free to just use their one valid liscense to the copyrighted material through ASCAP or BMI.

Keep in mind though... if you're going to broadcast smaller names such as I will be doing when I start looking into running my own servers, that if they don't go through ASCAP or BMI, you have to go through whatever organization they go through, and if they don't you have to have expressive written permission from the copyright owner themselves.

Hope that clears it up :-)

(So either pay your fees, or go through a company that has pre-existing contracts that cover your liability to pay fees)


FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION: Search for and read the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act"

[IanS]

Originally posted by BeenBusted
FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION: Search for and read the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act"
That Act will apply to the USA I assume (I'm too lazy to look for it :))
Again, I assume that the TOS of PW state something to the effect that "the laws of the United States shall apply." But where does that leave a site that does something legal in the USA and illegal in their home country? Granted most western countries will have similar laws but the timescale for their introduction is going to be quite a few years (as we've found within the EU).
Where does a site hosted in the USA but 'published' from elsewhere stand - and what if there is a conflict such that the site would be illegal if hosted in the 'home' country, but is 'legal and allowed on PW'?
(I realise that answers will not be legal opinions but I'm interested in peoples views.)