"The artist must be able to control their own works. No grey area on this one, I am afraid."

But I think there is a grey area in this way: radio play being the one that first springs to mind. If someone's posted up a song (or even 3 or 4 of your songs) for people to listen to (but not download) I think that the closest parallel is radio play.

Obviously in a perfect world you'd get a royalty from this public broadcasting of your songs, as you would do if they were played on Radio 1 or 2 or 3, or on XFM or whatever. But not all radio stations would be able to stay in business if they all did that (eg hospital radio, some local stations, college radio stations, internet radio stations, Resonance FM). If every radio station had to contact the musicians before playing the song, well, they just wouldn't bother. Personally, I'd rather they just went ahead. And most myspace pages are just doing that.

Bottom line is, there's a huge difference between places you can go to just listen to somebody's music; and places you can go and download their whole album for free. There's a big line between the two. For me, anyway.