[Jussi Korhonen]

On Friday 22 February 2002 02:23, Michael wrote:

> There's no 'degrees' of illegitimacy when it comes to bootlegging. 

Actually I think there actually are 'degrees'. There is a difference to 
circulating material that a band doesn't want to have publicly available 
(such as the demos) and material such as live tapings that they don't seem to 
care about. A live tape is material that a band wanted people to hear since 
they performed the songs in public in front of an audience. Some stolen demo 
tapes isn't something like that. Although I'm tempted to hear the demos, I 
have no obsession to own every single piece of Oils music in existence so I 
can live without them and not lose my sleep. In fact I'm going to sleep right 
after I've written this. Anyway, now anyone who wants the demos is able to 
get them without too much trouble, so whatever Midnight Oil thinks about the 
material doesn't change anything. But since it seems pretty obvious now that 
they don't like the idea of people getting the demos, I don't think they 
should be distributed. If it offends someone's idea of freedom of speech or 
something equally silly as that, who cares? In any case I appreciate that 
Maurice made the demos available to other powderworkers.

Certainly if you look at it from a legal point of view then I'm sure it's all 
technically illegal. But I quite prefer the idea of sharing music files 
across the internet over to buying bootleg albums at Ebay for $50. The 
sharing option doesn't include financial issues. Of course, someone could 
make a live disc out of some shared files and then sell it - but then again 
if someone wants to buy that sort of stuff, that's just unfortunate.

Having the Ghostwriters albums on the FTP site pretty much falls in the music 
piracy category, on the other hand.

Jussi