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     kevin Member Username: Kevin Post Number: 1461 Registered: 05-2005 |
Interesting article from The Guardian. Is this the same tactics being deployed in the States? (had to split over 2 posts due to size) Can filesharers be made to pay? The music industry is beginning to understand that lawsuits don't deter pirates and that it must find ways to make money from P2P sharing, says Adam Webb Adam Webb Thursday March 22, 2007 Guardian Looking forward to future business together ... " So concludes the cheerful, though some might say cynical, payment confirmation screen at P2Plawsuits.com, a website allowing American college students accused of uploading copyrighted music to peer-to-peer networks the opportunity to settle upfront and out of court. It's the latest initiative by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its fight against online piracy. The RIAA began legal actions against US citizens in June 2003, and its current strategy of targeting college campuses has created a wave of new headlines - most of them negative. In all, 13 US universities have been pressured into supplying the details of students who have shared music over their computer networks. Once revealed, those individuals will be offered a discounted settlement at P2Plawsuits. Failing that, they will be taken to court. But are these tactics likely to be imposed upon those who upload and share music in the UK? And are they having an impact on levels of P2P activity? High-profile case The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), has displayed a tad more sensitivity than its US counterparts, where more than 18,000 people have faced legal proceedings, including a recently deceased 83-year-old woman and, in one high-profile case, a 12-year-old girl. "You have to give the BPI credit," says Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons and editor of IT legal magazine Out-Law. "At the time that the RIAA started making noises about suing individuals, the BPI waited until the law was clear until and a legitimate [download business] was in place. I think they deserve credit for that." Since launching legal proceedings against 28 filesharers in October 2004, the BPI says only 111 further actions have been instigated. Of this total, 127 were settled out of court, with the offending individuals paying an average of £2,300. The remaining cases all resulted in civil actions; the BPI won each one with either default or summary judgements. The first of these cases, in January last year, resulted in a landmark legal ruling, with two men ordered to pay £5,000 and £1,500 respectively for copyright infringement. Additional costs and damages were estimated at up to £20,000. However, although the court's opinion was unequivocal - that "ignorance" about the legality of filesharing is not a defence - the question of whether those lawsuits have begun to eradicate file sharing is less clearcut. According to Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, a media analysis company that specialises in monitoring P2P traffic, around 1bn tracks are traded illegally each month. These figures are dwarfed by estimates made by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). It reckons that about 20bn tracks were illegally shared last year. And this despite the closure of many of the industry's P2P nemeses, such as the first, illegal Napster (against which some lawsuits are still outstanding), Grokster and Kazaa. | ||
| kevin Member Username: Kevin Post Number: 1462 Registered: 05-2005 |
"In Europe there have been hundreds of [legal] actions, but the number of filesharers are in the tens of millions," says Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research. "If you're a filesharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid." However, for the BPI's chief executive, Geoff Taylor, the primary motivation behind the legal action was never to stamp out filesharing, but to raise consciousness. "Our goals were to establish clearly that filesharing is illegal," he says. "We never expected these actions to wipe out illegal filesharing on their own, but they've done much to raise awareness about the illegality of distributing music over the internet using P2P networks, and have been effective in changing many consumers' behaviour." Taylor adds it is "likely" that legal actions will continue this year, although he would not say whether this would include downloaders as well as uploaders. So far only those who offer music have been sought, not those who grab a copy via download. The BPI will also be "developing new strands to our enforcement strategy that respond to developments in the nature of the internet piracy threat". That means bringing ISPs into the equation. The music industry is pressing ISPs to cut off people it identifies as filesharers. That has met with a distinctively cool reaction from ISPs, who do not see it as their job to do the BPI's enforcement. Of greater concern to the BPI is the fact that filesharing networks have fragmented. Traditional P2P networks such as Limewire and Morpheus are still operational, but an increasing volume of song swapping now takes place via closed social networks or MP3 blogs. Q magazine recently listed URLs for more than 20 of the latter in a feature titled "100 Ways To Get Free Music!" Additionally, explains Alex Rofman, vice-president of corporate and business development at SnoCap (a company set up by Napster founder Shawn Fanning to let artists monitor and profit from P2P sharing of their work), those behavioural traits synonymous with P2P - such as sharing, discovery and interaction - have now been appropriated and are the bedrock of a whole raft of Web 2.0 businesses, from MySpace and YouTube to Last.FM and Pandora. "In the traditional sense, 'P2P' is what Napster was - a downloadable client, not a whole lot of bells and whistles, just an index of content that was available. Social networking has really captured that unique aspect of content sharing that consumers love and brought it to a whole other level of self-expression - you can write about stuff, you can put photos up, you can chat with friends and so on. Hundreds of millions of consumers have evolved their behaviour and are consuming media in a much different and more legitimate way when they used to." Evolving models The music industry is adapting to these evolving consumption models and signing content deals often based on a cut of advertising. It has to - the revenue hole from falling CD sales is not being plugged by iTunes downloads. However, aside from encouraging consumers to, well, consume, such strategies will often mean partnering up with previously sworn enemies - such as Fanning, through SnoCap. Elsewhere, yet-to-be-launched "legal" P2P networks (ie users will be able to swap DRM-encoded tracks) QTrax and Mashboxx have all signed deals with major labels. The former will run on the Gnutella network, while the latter is headed by former Grokster boss Wayne Rosso. BitTorrent, meanwhile, has recently launched a legal download service. Its software will also power the next wave of video platforms in the shape of the BBC's iPlayer. And then there is Joost, whose founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, developed the technology that powered Kazaa. "Six years later, the labels have learned the difference between P2P and piracy," says Rosso. "They've learned that P2P is a technology. Ultimately, I think that the content will be free and all ad supported." The killer question then, adds Paul Brindley, MD of digital music research consultancy MusicAlly, is whether any of these business models can fly, or will be allowed to fly. "For all the talk about legalised P2P services, the question remains: where are they?" | ||
| Randy Adams Member Username: Randy_adams Post Number: 1086 Registered: 03-2005 |
Grrr. This subject makes me angry every time it's brought up. I am not much of a file-sharer other than to occasionally send individual songs off to other people to sample. I suppose I'm not a target, but the mentality behind this is so anti-art. I do not want a corrupted copy-protected music file. That's why I still insist upon getting actual CDs. Recently, someone who shall remain nameless has sent me recordings by Microdisney. Because the record companies do not regard Microdisney as worthy of continued distribution, it is damn near impossible to hear these songs any other way (though I AM hunting for the CDs of course). Do you think Cathal Coughlan and Sean O'Hagen don't want their early work to be heard? Right now, they are effectively silenced by the record industry. This goes for every low-volume artist, who will usually be the artists I am most interested in and whose work, in the long run, will prove the most lasting and valuable. I'm a lawyer and I don't give a %#$#$ what the legalities of the situation are. Morally, the music will ALWAYS belong to the artist and I only care about supporting the artist. As I've said many times before, I look forward to the demise of record companies; they're doing exactly the right thing to hasten its arrival. | ||
| Little Keith Member Username: Manosludge Post Number: 1726 Registered: 03-2006 |
Not that I really keep up, but I haven't heard of any big suits like the ones mentioned in the article here. Though there were some token ones a few years ago. I have noticed, in my surfing, the proliferation of the mp3 blogs. Another vehicle for downloading music that doesn't seem to be directly addressed above is bit torrent, which is sort of a form of P2P, but different...however, it's catching on and I think it's going to be the big thing. But anyway, the focus, once again, is all wrong - record companies, instead of "picking on the little guy", trying to make "examples", should be engaged in some kind of "Manhattan Project" to try and figure out what the hell they're going to do to overhaul the industry...they are in serious trouble. Here's one suggestion for them, for starters: no CD should cost more than $10. | ||
| Jeff Whiteaker Member Username: Jeff_whiteaker Post Number: 521 Registered: 10-2004 |
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with the $10 for new CDs thing. It seems the average price these days for a new CD is about $17.00 including sales tax, which is almost double what it would've been to buy a new, domestic LP 20 years ago. CDs are so cheap to manufacture, the high cost is just silly. I agree with the general sentiment stated here. File sharing is sometimes *necessary* for hearing albums that are long out of print and for which there are no plans to reissue. Like Randy's Microdisney example above - if someone wants to get into Microdisney and yet knows absolutely no one who is into them, file sharing may be that person's only chance of ever getting to hear their work. If labels aren't going to bother reissuing deleted albums, they shouldn't gripe about people acquiring them via file sharing. I say, if an album has been out of print for a few years, it should be fair game for free file sharing until it's given a proper reissue. | ||
| spence Member Username: Spence Post Number: 1361 Registered: 05-2005 |
Randy forgot you were a lawyer man!! Nice one!! Erm, I couldn't give a shit about the whole damn episode quite frankly. life's too fuc*in short. Just e-mail the file and be done, who really really cares what anyone thinks, fu*k the multi nationals! Its music, all the money makers forget that. | ||
| spence Member Username: Spence Post Number: 1362 Registered: 05-2005 |
Actually, I'd like to release everything on vinyl and then see what they could do about sharing that!!!!!!! | ||
| joe Member Username: Dogmansuede Post Number: 144 Registered: 07-2006 |
the irony, of course, is that file sharing is needlessly promoted by the copy protected cds. you just spent the money on your disc, but you want a copy of it for your mp3 player....hello.... i don't know that many people that are huge into the file sharing....i've been a soulseek fanatic for years and don't think we have or will ever see anything better. that being said, a large proportion of what i download i'm likely to purchase (sometimes over more than one format) in the very near future. my average salary as a back office teller for an investment bank can only stretch so far. even so, we just had to build a new case to hold another 400 or so cds acquired by my housemate and i.... |