Easymusicdownload.com is a music downloading service that is on the Center for Democracy and Technology's recently compiled a list of 30 websites that claim to offer legit music downloads, which are, in fact, not licensed distributors of the music they peddle. Easymusicdownload.com doesn't offer legal music or any type of reliable service - it's just there to take your money, and although it may resemble a fully licensed service, it is not one. Many people have come across fairly legitimate-looking Web sites offering unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of legal downloadable files and songs for something like $20 per year. That is the offer from easymusicdownload.com. Sounds like a great one, right? Wrong.

A quick look at the terms of service on EasyMusicDownload can tell you exactly what they doing. Essentially, they are selling you a copy of Kazaa or some other free peer-to-peer file sharing software. Their terms, for example, spell out that they are only selling you a recommendation of free software; they don't run the network that the software accesses; and they make no guarantees about content availability. There's also a section where you agree not to upload any content that "infringes any third party's intellectual property" to the peer-to-peer network. Translated, this means that you would not legally own any music downloaded from EMD.

Easymusicdownload.com is very devious in that unlike the scam sites where almost every link points to their sign-up page, I notice this site actually allows searches, including a limited selection of previews. However, unlike legitimate sites only a few search results (for a popular artist) can be previewed and the rest of the several hundred results all point to the sign-up page (without a preview). This gives me a feeling that while they may have a fairly decent library of MP3s, who knows how the rest of the music is obtained if one did sign up and try downloading any of the songs that could not be previewed.

They mention about EasyMusicDownload (or EMD) being seen on MTV, AOL, NBC and CNN, without links to any article on any of these sites. I'm sure if any did have something about the site, there would be a mention about it on their websites, even if archived. However, I done a quick search on each (for both terms), including using Google's site search and the closest I found to a result was someone's AOL profile containing a link to the site, but certainly no news past article on any of these. They make a claim of having a 13 million song library; If they did have the world's largest music library of legitimate music, there would have been plenty of news going about it.