Many people are wondering about the legal ramifications of downloading music from websites. Many people want to stay within the copyright restrictions and are therefore looking for websites where they can download music for free legally. There are many sites where people can pay a membership fee and download music on a per song basis or have unlimited access for one monthly fee.

Many people do not want to spend money to be able to download music though. There are several sites that allow free and legal downloads and the internet user who does a little research can find these sites online. Copyright is a simple legal concept and in essence is based on property rights.

The person or company that owns the copyright to a song or particular music, owns the song or music just as he would own any other type of property. The song, Happy Birthday to You, is actually a copyrighted song. Someone actually owns the rights to this popular birthday song.

Most restaurants have their own birthday song that they have their staff sing to their birthday customers instead of the traditional birthday tune. If the restaurant wants to have their staff sing the traditional birthday song to their customers, they would have to pay the copyright owner a royalty. Some restaurants pay the royalty but most restaurants sing their own made up birthday tune.

To the dismay of the music recording industry most people do not care about copyrights when it comes to music on the internet and it has cut into the record industry's profits. One reason people do not care about copyrights is because many people believe that music that is recorded and sold on compact discs or CD is too expensive and that the record company makes most of the profit and not the music artist. But the issue is not a question of profit and whether or not the profit is equally shared between artist and recording company, the issue is still about copyright and copyright infringement.

If an internet user downloads music without the copyright owner's permission this is copyright infringement. The record companies recently have sued certain internet users for illegal downloading of music. Record companies are using these cases as examples of how serious the companies take this situation.

The wise internet user will only download music from websites that have agreements in place with the record company to allow legal use of their music. There are many websites where people can download music for free legally. The internet user who wants to abide by the law should use only these sites.

download music for free legally