If you’re resourceful enough and you don’t like the idea of downloading torrents, chances are you should be able to search your way directly to an MP3 file of the song that you are looking for. However there are some people out there who may not know that downloading MP3 files are illegal, because whoever taught them to probably just told them that this was a way to get free music. Ignorance, however, is not an excuse in the eyes of the law, which is why a music body, the Performing Rights Society (PRS) for Music wants search engines to show which sites offer content illegally.
Their plan is to put up red or green tags next to search results which will indicate whether that site is offering content illegally (red) or legally (green). So for example if you searched for an audio file and it lead you to Rapid Share, chances are it will be illegal and will be marked red. However, if the search results point you to the artist’s website who happens to offer up their music for free, then a green tag will appear showing it is legal.
Of course this will probably not curb music piracy since it’s still a choice by the user as to whether they wish to access their music by illegal methods, but should the case be brought to court, then the downloader will not have an excuse as to why he/she was accessing an illegal site and performing illegal downloads.
For those who are unfamiliar with PRS, they are also the same company behind the change in Google’s Autocomplete search feature, which will now no longer list autocomplete phrases when attempting to search for torrents. As to their new plan, Google has no comments regarding it yet.
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