"This is a sad fact of life for anyone who wants to make a living doing something they love. If you do it all yourself, your income potential will be strictly limited. If you want to build a business out of it, you will end up not doing "it" very much, cause you'll be busy running the business."

So you're SUPPORTING the music biz as the rightful profite(e?)rs????

The difference between a plumber and a songwriter (or author) is that a plumber gets paid immediately for his work. Well paid. It takes most songwriters several years to "sell" their first song, but the advance isn't normally a living wage.

Do we want to discourage songwriters, authors, scriptwriters etc etc ad nauseum? I like music, books, TV etc etc ad nauseum.

The problem in this case is a really tricky one. Yes, public domain material should be available to the public, and certainly this site was more honest than most (there's a whole host of sites listing "public domain movie" torrents, with not a word on the fact that most of them are totally illegal outside of the USA).

However, if sites get closed for serving material that they have every right to serve... well...

I only see one solution, and that's for people like the UK's National Library and the US's Library of Congress to take responsibility for publishing their own country's expired works free of charge.

If they don't do it, someone else will.