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m3po
Legal or not?
The issue of legality will be on many people’s mind. What is legal and what is not?
There is a , possibly, quite legitimate objection from the music industry against the use of this
technology: The Internet is being used to distribute copyright-protected art forms (music in
this case). This cannot be questioned, as, given enough time, you can find loads of information
on the Internet, which really doesn’t belong there.
At this point, we would like to ask you to handle this issue responsibly, because it is not only
the industry, which can be damaged from the Internet, but also the artists themselves, espe-
cially those ones, who have no alternative of marketing their product.
The private use of this technology with legally purchased material, has not been a problem so
far – enough for us to develop and supply machines, which make the most of this new medium.
So how do you use your player that no-one goes empty-handed? The best way, of course, is to
have direct access to your vast amount of music on an HD. Therefore, you need to have pur-
chased the music legally, usually on CD. You can save these CDs to HD, convert them to .MP3
files and use them in your m3po player – as you have always done with conventional CDs for
private use. At this point, we would like to draw a comparison with copying to tape (for your
car stereo), or minidisk – everything OK.
However, it is generally not allowed to copy complete CDs for public (non-private) use.
In connection with this, the Internet should not be branded a nest of illegal activities. The web
is already the information source No. 1 and as a result, your first point of contact for purchas-
ing .MP3 software, or simply for learning more about the .MP3 format. Also, more and more
record labels appear in the web and offer hundreds of thousands of songs form newcomers, as
well as more established artists like: Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, David Bowie, Beastie Boys,
Billy Idol, Peter Townshend, Dionne Warwick, George Clinton, Die Toten Hosen – the list is
exhaustive. And this is only the beginning of a new format, which had been dreamt of by many
artists (and predicted by not so many...) for years.
