I haven't had much time to post lately but I wanted to share a streaming music hack for fans of internet radio and social music sharing sites: Free Music Zilla is an one-click utility that lets you download streaming music. Simply load the program and then launch you're favorite music streaming site. When you start playing a song, you will see a link in the window with an option to download it. This works great with Pandora, Last.fm, and Imeem and other sites like MySpace too.

The current version only lets you download up to 10 songs per day, however you can use Orbit to download more if you're really hungry for tunes. Some people think that it is wrong to capture data that resides on your own pc. But how is this different from DVR'ing a tv show so that you can watch it later? The industry says that you are a bad person for doing this, for example -- The RIAA has stated that if you move data to your pc that you bought legally, that is stealing.

The industry's own Web site says that making a personal copy of a CD that you bought legitimately may not be a legal right, but it "won't usually raise concerns," as long as you don't give away the music or lend it to anyone.

-The Washington Post

When will these execs realize that this moral argument is based on a faulty premise. Is it stealing if you eat the candy that I put in your hand? What if I take a picture of a painting that's on display in my apartment, so that I can look at on my computer? They really need to read Walter Benjamin's essay that he wrote 70 years ago when photography became popular -- when people thought that mechanical reproduction would mean the end of art. History tends to repeat itself.