Downloading an MP3 that is not available for purchase If I download an album, from 2011, from a TV show from a foreign country on archive.org, is that illegal or legal? I was not able to find the music to purchase legally in any capacity digitally. The only way seems to be second hand via ebay. It's an album from Japan and I live in America and was able to find it on archive.org.
An album from 2011 is pretty clearly going to be protected by copyright. Downloading such a work without permission would be copyright infringement, and therefore unlawful. However, it is not a crime in the US. If the copyright owner or the owner's agent learns of the download, you could be sued. Whether the owner would choose to bring suit is hard to say. However, for some content the Internet Archive has a program where a digital copy can be &quot;borrowed&quot; or &quot;checked out&quot; for a limited period of time. This is supposed to work like a library. The IA has made arrangements that will authorize this, or it is supposed to have done so. You only retain use of such a download for a limited period of time.
Copyright in the US is usually a civil matter. Meaning that the copyright owner can sue (typically for money damages or injunctive relief) an infringer. The criminal laws that we have are aimed at the reproducer and/or distributor. In other words, chances are that you won't get in any criminal trouble for accessing academic articles of dubious origin. But never say never. RIP Aaron Schwartz.
The players behind KAT don't make themselves known. The owners of Pirate Bay were known and were personally legally pursued. That's the place to start. Law enforcement can't criminally charge anyone if they don't know who is responsible. Second is that KAT complies with DCMA takedown rules. They publicly claim to at least. PB was known to have a more f-off attitude. The US Justice Dept does pursue KAT which is why KAT changes domains so often. They do get shut down. Law enforcement has better things to do. The record and movie studios and industry-groups have money and technology to pursue infringers. It's my impression that law enforcement is happy to let the copyright holders do the heavy lifting and the government can come in with criminal charges.
You are framing it wrong. It is not that "they have put a barrier" to public domain information, it is that they have added an additional source of that information. The new source has a barrier, yes, but that does not prevent you from accessing the same information elsewhere. If you own a copy of some public domain data, you are not allowed to prevent other users from accessing other copies (by claiming copyright infringement or the like); you cannot even prevent people from doing copies from the copies you did provide them. But you are not forced to allow other users to access your copy. Consider the logical conclusion if that were the law. The moment that you downloaded some public domain file into your computer, you would be forced to give access to your hard disk from the internet, isn't it? Would you need to leave your home door open if you happened to have a printed copy of the text there? Of course, there is a need to discriminate between "public domain" (without licence) and "not public domain but open licence" (BSD, CC, GPL, etc.). In the later case the licence could be tailored so that the work could appear in archive.org but that it would be illegal to provide it with the business model of Academia.edu1. But that would be possible only for works not in the public domain. 1 To be decided by a judge on the basis of the wording of the licence and jurisdiction.
Interesting that they don't give a source and also don't link to anywhere (such as Wikimedia commons). So I assume that content is google's own. So generally speaking: No, when no license is provided, that means you can't use whatever it is in a project of yours (whether commercially or not), because the &quot;default&quot;, when nothing is specified, is that no license is given. So unless you find a license that grants you a permission on google's own content, these sounds can't be used freely.
I see that channel offers playlists and &quot;videos&quot; of popular music by several artists. The one video I tried had the music with no accompanying video or images. The channel's about page says that then operator does not own the copyrights to the music and cannot grant others permission to play it. It is possible that the channel operator has obtained permission from the artists and is thus operating under a valid license. It is possible that the channel is committing copyright infringement, but the various copyright owners have not noticed the channel, or have noticed it but decided not to take action. There is no easy way for an outsider to tell which of these is correct. If the operator has not obtained proper permission, then it seems that this would be copyright infringement. If so, any copyright owner could send a takedown notice, use YouTube's own copyright complaint mechanism, or could file a copyright infringement suit. But nothing compels the owner to act if the owner chooses not to, it is entirely the owner's choice. I do not see that the US fair use or any other exception to copyright would be likely to apply here. If the owner brought suit and won (and a win seems likely to me, from what I can see), the operator would be liable for damages, which might be sizable, or mild. In the US at least the owner could also obtain a court order (injunction) requiring the operator to stop using the owner's copyrighted music. If the owner complained to YouTube, the site could add a &quot;copyright strike&quot; against the operator's account. After a few strikes (I think three) YouTube will cancel the account, according to its posted policies. Similar outcomes could face anyone else who posted or made available for streaming copyrighted content (such as music) without permission from the copyright owner. But again, everything depends on action by the copyright owner. If the owner chooses, for whatever reason, not to act, then nothing is likely to be done about the infringement.
Can he name a particalur one, like Linkin Park? Or that would be considered non-allowed type of advertising? Generally speaking, that does not constitute unlawful advertising. Public figures are allowed to broadcast their preferences on issues that are more sensitive than topics of music. There might be few, rare exceptions where something like this would be outlawed, but most likely that has to do with a regime's censorship of specific bands or music styles rather than with a general prohibition.
Depending on where exactly you are in the world, there is some protection for the representation of copyright-expired material if work went into presentation. So you might be allowed to put a Bach cantata into musical notation yourself, since he died in 1750, but you cannot simply copy another publisher's sheet music to save that work. The same might apply to an old newspaper article. If you find a print and scan it, you can upload it, but you may not be able to take it from the database organized by someone else. In austria, there is §40f Urheberrecht, which defines databases (they may or may not be collected editions). §40h clarifies how the right to a private copy in §42 extends only to &quot;private use and neither directly nor indirectly commercial purposes.&quot; In germany, there is 87a-e UrhG, which covers databases whose assembly did not represent creative work (e.g. by simply ordering things by date). They are protected if the assembly required significant investment. This &quot;lesser protection&quot; lasts only 15 years, not 70, and there is a &quot;a significant part&quot; test for copying less than the whole database.