Last October, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) filed 26 lawsuits against those sharing copyright infringing music over file sharing networks. Now the BPI has announced that 23 out of court settlements were made with values ranging up to UK£4,500 and averaging just over £2,000, while the remaining three cases are still in negotiation. These lawsuits were filed on users across various file sharing networks as well as across the UK and those who settled consist of 17 men and 6 women of ages between 22 and 58.
Like how the RIAA keeps filing its rounds of lawsuits in the US, the BPI will continue doing the same in an aim to make their message clear that users are more safe using legal alternatives than to risk legal action with the use of file sharing services. The BPI is in the process of getting a further 31 suspect file sharer's details reveled through the high court. These include users using Kazaa, eDonkey, Grokster, Soulseek, DirectConnect, Limewire, Bearshare and iMesh in an aim for the BPI to say that no file sharing network is safe to share out copyrighted content.
According to the BPI, Kazaa traffic went down 45% between April 2003 and January 2005. They also claim traffic on eDonkey went down by 61% and traffic on BitTorrent went down by 66%. However it is not clear over what period does this cover or were they sourced this information. I Have Piles used our news submit to let us know about the following news:
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The BPI announced a further 31 cases across eight different P2P networks are in the pipeline as part of its attempt to broaden its campaign against illicit file sharing on the net. Other actions may follow. The 23 settlements announced Friday arise out of the 26 cases announced by the BPI in October 2004. Three cases are still in negotiation and legal action may follow. The settlements include internet users from all over the UK '“ 17 men and six women aged between 22 and 58. Those caught out included a student, the director of an IT company and a local councillor. The BPI said that it some cases it's likely that parents settled because of files uploaded by their children but it doesn't go into details. The average settlement is more than £2,000. Two illegal file sharers are paying more than £4,000 each to settle their cases. BPI General Counsel Geoff Taylor said: "We have no desire to drag people through the courts. So we have attempted to reach fair settlements where we can. We hope people will now begin to get the message that the best way to avoid the risk of legal action and paying substantial compensation is to stop illegal file sharing and to buy music online, safely and legally, instead." Read the full article here. |
It seems like what ever source the BPI has got their eDonkey and BitTorrent traffic report from seems to be way off as it was not long ago that BitTorrent was shown to have had insignificant effect even when the MPAA began its rounds of shutting down torrent tracking sites.
Like the first rounds of lawsuits by the RIAA, the amount of file sharing is likely to drop in the beginning, but unfortunately no matter how many lawsuits the RIAA file in the US it seems like their efforts are no longer having any significant effect on reducing file sharing.
Feel free to dicuss and find out more about the legal issues of file sharing on our Music Downloads, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues Forum.
Source: The Register - Internet
