UK Record Industry Starts Suing Filesharers

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has the story that the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has started a first set of lawsuits against UK file sharers. 23 people paid £50,000 to settle out of court. This is the first time people in the UK have been fined, and probably won't be the last. From the article: "We are determined to find people who illegally distribute music, whichever peer-to-peer network they use, and to make them compensate the artists and labels they are stealing from."

Comments

The industry needs to changes its marketing strat

[dmf415]

When will the record companies learn, if they price there product in an affordable price range, people will buy.

Apple has sold approximately 85 million songs in the first two months of 2005, surpassing Piper Jaffray's initial estimates for the entire March quarter. Based on Apple's earlier announcement of 300 million total tracks sold, Senior Research Analyst Gene Munster says that iTunes sales could account for $83.2 million in revenue in the March quarter--or about $35 million more than the firm has been estimating. The firm also believes average daily sales rate has been 1.35 million per day since late January, which very similar to the 1.43 million daily run rate (i.e., sales of songs) in the weeks following the holidays. "We had been anticipating a more significant drop off in iTunes sales from the levels seen in the weeks following the holidays."

In addition to driving iPod sales, the firm says that Apple's iTunes Music Store will also contribute significantly to the company earnings: while it estimtates that the current operating margin on iTunes is in the low single digits, Piper Jaffray says it believes iTunes profitability will begin to increase throughout 2005, with operating margins reaching 5% to 10% in 2006.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/03/02/itunes.gr ow ing.fast/

Re:Ouch

[a16]

This isn't £50,000 each - it's £50,000 total. To quote TFA:

The average compensation payment was £2,200 each, with one person paying £4,500.

hmm scary

[real_smiff]

Fifteen of the 23 used the Kazaa peer-to-peer network, four used Imesh, two used Grokster, one used WinMix and one was on BearShare.

First observations: no ed2k, no soulseek there. these are still fairly mainstream/'newbie'/old networks. all of these allow you to see a list of someone's shares? i wonder where else they're monitoring/know about - there's a lag in their learning about the newest trading methods, but there's also a lag in this sort of news getting out, so it's tricky to know.

Some questions i'd like answered:
What kind of music (artists, genres, labels) were they sharing?
Why were they singled out (uh, awful pun)- sharing >x000 songs on a fixed IP for > x days?
Are the IPs of these british organistions listed in anti-anti-P2P blocking lists? i can bet these people weren't using any blocking, but would it have helped is another question.. proper anonymous music trading networks anyone?

"Some parents have been genuinely shocked to discover what their children have been up to

yeah, there's always a quote like this. trying to make it sound so righteous. What about the parents who said "wtf, you're extorting 5 grand out of us for what?" they never get quoted.

"we have attempted to reach fair settlements where we can".

What attempt. It's pay a huge fine*, or go to court and risk paying a really huge fine. It can't be a deterrent and be fair. So admit it: it's not fair to the people caught, but you're desperate to scare people. I trust the next BPI press release will show how much the artists got from this (yes, sarcasm).
*and admit you've been naughty and promise not to do it again, of course. whatever that means.

"28 IP addresses and it was later discovered that two people accounted for four IP addresses on their list"

interesting, the fact that two people out of such a small pool were caught *twice* suggests they are looking for something very specific, like a particular list of songs (e.g. counting the matches, then taking the IPs of those with the most?). i'm guessing that these were people with dynamic IPs, rather than those sharing e.g. at home and at work.

Well i've been expecting this to happen in the UK - really, i'm amazed its taken until 2005 - and i always said "fuck it, safety in numbers" but i have to admit it is slightly scary to know you could get caught... i guess carrry on with the indie music, people! (and you know, buy some; just don't support the pigopolists, either by buying their music, or getting caught and really funding their lawyers.

btw, do they actually have to listen to your songs to see if they are the material as named? if so, maybe having a max-uploads-per-IP in the client would help you not get into trouble, as well as being fairer, spreading things around?