Source: The Lawyer
Monday, 29th November, 2004

The British Phonographic Institute is coming down hard on filesharers. Geoff Taylor and Simon Baggs report on the culling of the music thieves

“Piracy is theft, pure and simple.� These were the words of Estelle Morris, Minister for the Arts, commenting on the 7 October announcement by the British Phonographic Institute (BPI), representing UK record companies, that it was commencing legal action against illegal filesharers in the UK.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) internet filesharing has become a serious problem for the recording industry worldwide. Although the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) succeeded in closing down the original illegal Napster service in 2001, newer services have emerged, a number of which (such as Morpheus and KaZaA) are the subject of ongoing legal action. The impact on sales has been marked, with worldwide recorded music sales falling from $38bn (£20.45bn) in 1998 to $32bn (£17.22bn) in 2003. In the UK, the singles market has declined by nearly 50 per cent over the same period.

Following similar action in the US, the BPI has now commenced legal action against 26 people in the UK that have uploaded hundreds of thousands of recordings on filesharing networks such as KaZaA, Grokster, BearShare and WinMX, without the consent of the copyright owners. A lengthy public education campaign by the BPI, including sending hundreds of thousands of instant messages to UK uploaders warning of possible legal action, established high levels of awareness of the illegality of unauthorised sharing; but, as in the US, education alone did not prove sufficient. Similarly, the launch of a variety of high-profile licensed online music services, such as the Apple iTunes Music Store and Napster 2.0, with a catalogue of more than a million different recordings available, failed to deter some people from infringing copyright.

P2P networks enable individual computers to communicate with each other and share files via the internet. This direct communication between one user of the network and another enables the millions of users of P2P networks to search for and download files, including files containing sound recordings, from other users anywhere in the world. Users need only download and install the software application. Any user can make sound recordings available to other users on the network by placing the files containing those sound recordings in the ‘shared files’ directory on their computer.

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