The Times newspaper recently documented that the average student has about 800 illegal music files on his or her hard drive, most gained through P2P filesharing services, such as Limewire. Other files come from swapping music with friends or family.
Given that MP3 players usually hold about 1,500 or so songs, you start to see that 800 is a significant proportion of the number of songs students are listening to. While most people understand that filesharing can be illegal, the vast majority of people don’t give two thoughts to copying a CD or swapping music, even though it’s still illegal.
It’s bizarre to think that borrowing a CD from your buddy and then copying it to your hard drive to listen to is illegal. It’s things such as this that really cloud the whole issue of music piracy. Where does it end and where does it begin? Can you be taken to court for record a cassette just as you can for using Limewire? The whole scene is so uneven.