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But are my MP3s legal?
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November 29, 2001: 3:39 p.m. ET
Digital music often violates copyright, but enforcement is lax.
By Borzou Daragahi
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NEW YORK (Money) - When Marty Levinson, a 22-year-old law student at the University of Georgia, discovered he could download music from the Web, it was a dream come true. "All of a sudden, I could get all sorts of music, and I didn't have to buy the entire CD to get it," he says.
Every time Levinson (or anyone else) downloads a tune off the Internet, he is almost certainly stepping outside the law. "It's copyright infringement," says Andy Norwood, an intellectual-property attorney at Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis in Nashville. "Downloading a copyrighted file is making a copy, one of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder."
Some say digital music on the Net has already eaten into CD sales. Worldwide music sales dropped 5% in the first six months of 2001, while sales of blank CDs increased 80% last year and are expected to grow 40% this year, according to the International Federation of Phonographic Industries.
You're on safe legal ground if you copy songs for your own use from CDs you own. But duplicate a song and give it to a friend, whether on a burned disk or over the Net, and you too are violating copyright. And unless you know otherwise, it's safe to assume that every piece of recorded music you encounter online is copyrighted.
That said, average citizens have routinely abused copyrights ever since the photocopier and the dual-cassette deck were invented -- yet the government has rarely gone after such scofflaws. And given law enforcement's other priorities right now, that's not likely to change soon. "Are they going to throw you into the hoosegow and fingerprint you and take your photograph?" says Norwood. "Probably not." 
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