But Matt it is IS banned. It's illegal in international law (apart from in a handful of countries with no copyright legislation).

It may be hard to police - everything on the net comes into that category - but it's easy to increase public awareness of this illegality, so that fewer people will be likely to do infringe copyright in ignorance, so more people will recognise when it's happening and agree that it's wrong, and more people will alert either the web master or the copyright holder when it happens.

Most of these bespoke download sites carry a stipulation that you can only upload material that you own, and warn you that if you proceed when you don't, then you are breaking the law.

Sometimes this instruction is not as obvious as it should be, and often it's ignored (myspace is riddled with fan sites who have plainly not got permission to upload tracks).

But we can be vigilent, and we can blow the whistle when we find wrongdoing. It's called society :-)

Tom

By the way, re myspace - you can choose whether to make the tracks you upload be downloadable, or just playable without download. There is a difference - and though it's always possible to record a non-downloadable track, with a mic if necessary, you can make it harder for people to copy your music if you want to. That's why people put shortened versions up. We did for the Pipers Sons, though my own myspace has full tracks which I'm happy to 'cast as bread upon the water.'