Rings whose faithful left ideals are cofaithful

A left module M over a ring R is cofaithful in case there is an embedding of R into a finite product of copies of M. Our main result states that a semiprime ring R is left Goldie, that is, has a semisimple Artinian left quotient ring, if and only if R satisfies (i) every faithful left ideal is cofaithful and (ii) every nonzero left ideal contains a nonzero uniform left ideal. The proof is elementary and does not make use of the Goldie and Lesieur-Croisot theorems. We show that (i) and (ii) are Morita invariant. Moreover, (ii) is invariant under polynomial extensions, and so is (i) for commutative rings. Absolutely torsionfree rings are studied.