Music industry's new piracy crackdown

STOCKHOLM--The music industry's top lobby group said on Tuesday it was launching new legal action against those who illegally share files over the Internet, which it blames for diminished sales.

The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said it was launching 2,100 legal cases and extending the action to five new countries in Europe, Asia and, for the first time, South America.

It said file-sharers in Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Hong Kong and Singapore faced prosecution for the first time.

"It's the thinking of dinosaurs for anyone to believe that they can steal music after all the education and campaigns that we have had," IFPI head John Kennedy told Reuters.

The group said it was taking further action against uploaders, people who put music out on the Internet via peer-to-peer software, which allows others to download the files.

The group said the actions, which are either civil complaints or criminal prosecutions launched on Tuesday or brought recently, took the total number of legal cases against uploaders to more than 3,800 in 16 nations outside the United States.

The legal action is part of the music industry's carrot-and-stick approach of promoting legal digital music services such as Napster and Apple Computer's iTunes while prosecuting illegal file sharers.

Sales of digital music tripled in the first half of 2005, representing 6 percent of the market, or about $790 million.

IFPI said its legal remedies so far had led to mostly young men between the ages of 20 and 30 who paid fines of $3,000 or more.

The cases being launched in Sweden, Argentina, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore are in addition to those pursued in Austria, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States, it said.

IFPI said that in Argentina four out of 10 Internet users had used unauthorized peer-to-peer services. In Singapore, the recording industry has filed 33 criminal complaints involving users of the file-sharing networks FastTrack and Gnutella, it said.

In Hong Kong, civil actions are being brought against 22 uploaders. In November, a man who uploaded three films onto the BitTorrent network was sentenced to three months jail, it said.

In Sweden, IFPI said, the music industry was announcing 15 criminal complaints against music uploaders, with more complaints to follow. It said research showed that more than 1 million people in the Nordic country are file sharing illegally.


Story Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.



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