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Last I heard, in Canada downloading music is or at least was legal because of the recordable CD levy. The judge apparently stated that cashing the levy check was tacit permission.
Needless to say that's due to a peculiarity of Canadian law and not generally applicable.
In the meantime we're dealing with a copyright system that was designed to do one thing but is being used for something else under radically different conditions than those it was created to deal with.
The original idea was that copyright was intrinsically bad, a lesser evil imposed on society as an incentive to creators to continue to create. Copyright law was an artifice to keep works from their natural state in the public domain. Now the purpose of copyright is to assert ownership, and treat the private domain as the natural state. These laws also came into being when each copy of a book was relatively expensive to produce, as opposed to today's world where an e-book can be duplicated with a simple CTRL-C, CTRL-V.
Things are changing and the law hasn't caught up yet.
Eventually it will. In the meantime, we are going to have an interesting time dealing with it.
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