Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California

I cannot give you an opinion as to the legitimacy of Jamendo, but I see nothing on the site that raises any red flags for me. Note, however, that Jamendo claims jurisdiction of the laws of Luxemburg, and it is quite possible (though I do not know) that a practice that is lawful in Luxemburg is infringing in the United States.

As for the Creative Commons license, there is certainly nothing wrong with it. See http://creativecommons.org/ (linked from Jamendo) for more details, as different songs are under different CC licenses. The CC license is actually a more progressive form of copyright licensing. U.S. copyright law, as administered by the U.S. Copyright Office, has long held what you might call a bias in favor of "copyright maximalists". That is, the "default" position is that "all rights are reserved and we may sue the pants off of you," when, in fact, millions of copyright owners are more than happy to allow others to make certain uses of their copyrighted works. The CC approach is to try to correct that bias and empower copyright owners to let you know, right up front, that they authorize certain uses.

The Copyright Office's approach is a real shame, because it has the effect of abridging the First Amendment rights of authors. My father, for example, would have loved for people to reproduce and publicly perform the songs he wrote, and he never attempted to commercially exploit his works. Yet, anyone coming across a copy would have to assume that unless they can find my fathers' heirs and obtain permission, we could sue them for doing precisely what my father would have welcomed.

The point is that while I have no information on the website itself, if the CC licenses are legitimate, there is nothing wrong with downloading pursuant to such as license. You ask, "what are the rights of ownership for people downloading the creative commons licensed music?" There is no right of "ownership," as such. Rather, the various CC licenses grant the specific rights stated for each type of license, but do not transfer ownership of the work itself. On the other hand, if you own the CD-R or hard drive upon which you reproduce a copy pursuant to a CC license, you continue to own the CD-R or hard drive after the licensed reproduction, and the ordinary rights of ownership in the CD-R or hard drive continue. (See 17 U.S.C. � 202, that points out that copy rights and rights to copies are two separate things; http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html.)