as is common given the age of the internet and technology, there are quite a few sites offering downloads of elliott's album for free. these sites of course, offer the songs without permission and downloads made through them don't count towards sales (ergo, they will not help in chart placements, nor will they give profit to elliott and everyone else responsible for putting out the album, which is tantamount to stealing really).

as of today, i found about five sites offering it for free and each of them recorded at least 500 downloads for the album (that's 500 x 5 sites = 2500 album downloads that are illegal). realistically speaking of course, given the scope of the internet and the access people have to technology that allows them to rip the cd into mp3s and post them on file sharing sites, we may not be able to really get rid of these but we can help minimize them.

if you encounter sites that offer the E music illegally, please pm me or brandon (croweb70) the links. we'll send them to elliott's team and hopefully they can take action and pull it off the net. thanks everyone.

note: this thread will be moved to The Music in a few hours.

I've personally reported about 5 sites and noticed several others whose files were removed. The problem is...they will only put the files right back up so the only way to permanently stop a site is to report them to the webspace provider and get the site shut down. Almost every web host forbids illegal file sharing...so report the site, not just the files.

too true, LC. some sites have been rather clever too. notice how most of them post a disclaimer on the bottom of the page that goes something like "this site does not keep the files on its server but merely keeps an index of the files available on other sites" or something to that effect. tsk, tsk.

Even if they have a disclaimer, they are still linking to illegal material, which potentially places the server owner in hot water. It can't hurt to report the site to the webhost...and definitely report the pirate files.

can someone PM me the links so I can also report them to their server to have them removed.

I've already purchased 8 CD's so it's not for my personal use :).


eta: problem is sometimes they are the server :(