Found a memory stick - about the music on it...

Today while walking home I found a semi-crushed mp3 player that also acts as a memory stick. I plugged it into my old PC and to my surprise it contained a lot of music that I liked. I know and like around half of all the songs on it and since I have never downloaded some of these songs I thought I'd put them on my iPhone. My worries are that this music was downloaded from a dodgy place so if I transfer this music to my iMac is there the possibility that the music can contain viruses? I remember asking this before but that was for me downloading from torrent websites. Now I get all my music from itunes however there are a couple of songs I like from an artist called Giggs who does not have some of his early songs on any major sites such as itunes, I have found his music on a website called junkie or bt something, if I downloaded it from that site on my mac should I be safe from viruses? Oh and on the device I found it says MD130 USB DISK/MP3/WMA, what should I do with it? Thanks in advance!

You didn't pay for that music. Therefore, it would be illegal for you to keep it.

When it is virtually impossible to find the owner of something I always tend to go by the "finders keepers" rule. If it's something like a phone or wallet were you can usually trace back to the original owner and give it to them then that would be the first thing I'd do. With this it's simply just a stick containing songs. Let's be sensible here, I am not going to spend hundreds of pounds on itunes for songs that I already now have, I would never download these songs illegally but due to my luck of coming across a memory stick that holds these songs it would be stupid not to keep them.

That rule applies for physical objects. You can keep the memory stick. You cannot, however, keep the music on it.

I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't do, I'm reminding you what the law is, and discussing illegal behavior is not allowed here at Mac-Forums.

You have got me confused now.

So going by your logic if I can legally keep the memory stick then I can also keep the music on it. It's like saying you are the owner of a book but not the pages and writing inside it.

This is going off topic now, all I need to know is whether or not these files could potentially harm my mac. Thanks.

Well since Kash is pretty much a lawyer, and he says its illegal, we are pretty much done here.