stream formatted music?

Music encoded as MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV, etc etc etc is "formatted music" - not sure what you mean here. However, it is illegal to distribute or obtain copyrighted intellectual property, music included, unless proper and appropriate copyright requirements and considerations have been met.

In my opinion the fight for digital rights management is a loosing battle that will only end up anoying the honest purchasers and pushing many to pirated copies.

Sony, my pet complaint for the year was including XCP software, which is a rootkit and now classed as malware forced on those who legaly purchased thier music and wanted to play it on their computer.

There are recording devices that can take the CD , transfer to analog (as you need to play) , feed it back and record perfectly. Hell, you don't even need to transfer to analog , you can send in SPDIF or AES feed back the digital and you have a perfect reproduction bit for bit. Any idea how the record companies plan to stop that?

I think it's got to the stage where these companies now are only pretending DRM is only for protecting their rights, its just as much for market share leverage. Scumbags , gready little piggies the lot of them, last I heard they wanted to up the charge for downloading songs.

Well, like the law or not, it is the law. That aside, the media industry in general is blameshifting, looking for some comforting way to explain away their sagging fortunes. It isn't filesharing thats hurting the music industry, it isn't video games that have handed Hollywood its biggest losses in over a generation, it isn't the internet thats brought about sales declines for newspapers and periodicals, and dropoffs in television viewership; its that the crap product they're putting out the public simply isn't buying. Its not that too many folks are stealing media, its that the media moguls aren't providing anything the public cares enough about to want to purchase, whether its movies, music, books, newspapers, and even with hundreds of channels from which to choose, there's damned little on TV worth watching, so the ad dollar spent there reaches fewer and fewer folks every year. The media industry is its own enemy..

you know, I agree with the law and your comments are right on, the entertainment industry has been offering very little.

But the fact remains , for those who wish to copy, its piece of cake and always will be , because at some point the audio needs to go to speakers ...so it can always be copied.

Belive it or not, thers a law that is trying to be passed refering to the "analog hole" and using watermarking to protect the analog content.

To be more specific the steam music I wish to copy is off archive.org
live concerts. Recently the grateful dead sound board recordings at the request of ' grateful dead production' became unavailable to down load and are available in steam format only. I have herd tell of a program that would that would down load steam format alas I have not been
able to one. tk's