It is illegal to download and share copyrighted material including MP3's, video, and picture files without permission of the owner of the copyrighted material.

MSU-Northern provides the information on this page as a guideline to help you avoid trouble, not as a legal document. For further legal information on the Copyright Laws, visit the United States Copyright Office website.

The United States has a set of laws called Copyright Law. People on ResNet are expected and obligated to follow these laws. The basis of these laws is that a person who creates something should have exclusive rights to his or her work. These rights include:

Reproduction
Derivative
Work
Distribution
Public Performance

Copyrighted material includes almost all forms of original expression fixed in a tangible medium. Once it is fixed in this tangible medium (you cannot copyright a thought or daydream) it enjoys legal protections even if no formal copyright notice is filed or attached.

Copyright infringement is any reproduction, display or distribution of copyrighted (protected) material without permission of the copyright owner.

Creating a compilation of songs from CDs and converting them to MP3
files does not in and of itself constitute infringement. Infringement does
occur when you facilitate the distribution of those files because of the
negative impact you have on the market value of the work and the harm
done to the copyright owners (who are often the authors of the work).

Links:
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
Criminal Intellectual Property Laws
United States Copyright Office
10 Big Myths About Copyright
University at Texas Fair Use Of Copyrighted Materials Pages (definitions, Fair Use, multimedia, seeking permissions)
The Copyright Website from Benedict O'Mahoney
Cornell Law School: copyright: an overview