Legal Or Not? Options

[JusClownin]

Hi guys. Wasn't sure if this was the best forum for this, but here goes.

As a hobby, a friend and I record vocals on random instrumentals of recordings that we usually find on CD singles at the record store or on the net.

They are pretty humorous and have little or nothing to do with the artist who created the instrumental. We want to create site where we can share our renditions with the public for free. We both have full time careers and have absolutely no interest in selling these songs, not that anyone would buy them, or making profit off the site. It would be fully funded by out of our own pocket and we wouldn't have any advertisers. Just a personal site.

Does anyone know if we'd run into any legal problems by doing this? Like I said, it's just a hobby. Basically, we're just two old friends from high school that get together maybe 3 times a year, drink and have some fun jamming on these recordings. They are by far from "great" quality, but they're actually not so bad, for what it's worth.

Anyway, any input or advice would be great. I just fear having some big-wig artist or label sue us for something so trivial.

[abcdaniel]

In Sweden we have a new law since july 2005, that criminalizes downloading of copyrighted material. Before it was ok to copy for personal use, including downloading. It wasn't, however, ok to spread copyrighted material. Anyway, at the same time as downloading became illegal, there was also introduced a penalty fee on CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, and mp3-players. So on the one hand it is illegal to download music, on the other hand you pay a fee for downloading music every time you buy a CD-R!

The fees are spread to composers and copyrightholders according to how much radioplay they get, not according to how much they are downloaded. This is obviously deeply unfair, since independent artists can get thousands of downloads and still never get radio play.

At the same time the penalty rate for downloading copyrighted material is so low, like a parking ticket, that the Swedish police has stated that it won't put any resources into it; they got more important stuff to do.

This is all ok, and not really outrageous. The majors got their criminalization, the people are still downloading, the copyrightholders get some more money.

What is apparent, though, is that it isn't really dealing with any of the problems, and that it is just an illogical piece of legislation. Criminalizing people is a bad idea, and spreading royalties from downloads according to radio play is just incredibly passive and blind to the realities of P2P-distribution for indies.

it is still better than in France, i guess