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In 2007, several Brandeis students received letters from the RIAA. The letters alleged that the students had been sharing copyrighted files without permission, and threatened to sue if the students did not pay a settlement fee. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, RIAA settlements usually range from $3000 to $7000.
Brandeis University strictly prohibits unauthorized sharing of copyrighted files. All users must agree to respect relevent local, state, and federal copyright law before gaining access to the network.
The music on this list is all free of Digital Rights Management technology, or DRM. DRM is designed to restrict the actions that a user is able to perform with the files it is applied to. For example, a video file with DRM applied might only be playable a certain number of times, stop being playable at a certain date, or be playable only from a certain computer. DRM frequently has the side effect of preventing files being used on certain platforms, such as iPods and other portable media players, and computers running Mac OS or Linux.
Amazon MP3 offers the largest catalog of non-DRM songs currently available anywhere. It works with all computers and all music players.
The iTunes store offers many non-DRM songs. You need to install the iTunes software to use the iTunes store.
These sites mostly offer streaming music rather than music downloads. The stream works like a radio station, except that you can control what kind of music it plays. The sites only work on your computer, but they're free.
Jamendo and the Internet Archive both offer legal free downloads and streaming of music that has passed into the public domain or is offered under a Creative Commons license. You probably won't find your favorite musicians on these sites, but they have a lot of good music if you're willing to try something new.
Naxos Music Library is the most comprehensive collection of classical music available online. Brandeis subscribes to Naxos as part of our library database program, so the service is free for all community members. Like Last.fm and Pandora, Naxos uses a streaming format, so you can't record songs to CD or put them on your portable player.
Do you know of any other good, legal, DRM-free music on the web? Let us know!
