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."

MPAA is on its way

[moofdaddy]

This is just the start of the trends which have become somewhat commonn place in the states making the hop over the Atlantic. I think read on Drudge yesterday that the MPAA is considering a similar manuever in the UK. Insiders say that they plan on going after people who are sharing 10 movies or more. For now they are only planning on targeting those who offer up movies which have yet to be released but I would imagine they will be widening that net before too long.

Ouch

[Frogmum]

Seriously, 50,000 pounds for some music? They're so extreme with the amounts.

Before the whining starts

[jim_v2000]

The music companies are totally right in doing this. It IS their property, and people don't have the right to use it for free. Go use Napster or iTunes if you don't want to buy cds.

follow the money

[MrLint]

"...make them compensate the artists and labels they are stealing from."

Don't most artists make only a pittance on their album sales anyway, even after they have paid back the label for their 'generous' promotional contract?

Call me cynical, but claiming that the settlement money is going to go to artists seems disingenuous. Of course claiming 'lost' profits by the labels on file sharing is moreso.

Re:The industry needs to changes its marketing str

[jim_v2000]

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

While I agree music is overpriced and the musicians undercompensated, it's still not a reason to download the songs illegally. It's like walking into a Wal-Mart, stuffing something in your coat, walking out, and justifying it by saying that they charge too much anyway. Stealing is stealing.

Re:wi fi

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you can be sued as you are RESPONSIBLE and LIABLE to the service agreement and no you should NOT be resharing it. Its like hiring out an already hired appartment, usually you cannot do this. Its like hiring out a car you bought on hire purchase, you DONT own it. Its you name on the dotted line, not the general publics.

you know...

[opposume]

why don't they just sue for the ammount of $ they have stolen (i.e. the average cost of a CD) instead of charging these OUTRAGEOUS fees? Any body?

Is this supposed to be bad?

[subreality]

So, way back in the day, everyone was outraged that the music industry was trying to fight piracy by litigating away P2P technology, instead of going after the people who were actually breaking the law.

Now they're going after the people who actually break the law, instead of trying to end P2P.

I think that the idea of fair use ought to be extended, but am I supposed to be outraged that this is happening? They're actually going after people who are breaking the law, instead of trying to end technologies with legitimate uses.

Isn't this exactly what we asked for?

Re:Before the whining starts

[dj_tsd]

The problem is that it IS NOT their property. The RIAA is NOT a rightsholder. Therefore, by US law, their lawsuits are frivolous. They are suing on the behalf of others, who are mistaken if they expect money from the RIAA. The RIAA should go back to worrying about who gets gold records.

Re:wi fi

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be a good idea to block p2p ports on your router.

There's no such thing as "p2p ports". P2P apps can use any port, just like anything else can.

Re:Before the whining starts

[wdd1040]

So, if you write a book and I "steal" a copy of it and redistribute it.... Let's say you would have made $50,000 off of it. I distribute it to 4 people, who distribute it for 4 more people. All 17 of us get sued and told to pay $10,000 in damages. They are totally right in doing it, but they should at least have more acceptible fines than these insane ones.

Uh...

[Dachannien]

make them compensate the artists

Bahahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahaha hahaha haha whew.

Sorry about that.

I just don't buy any music anymore

[yodaj007]

I mean, really, I don't want to pay what I consider outrageous prices for crap. I'm not downloading anything either. If you want some good music, go down to your local coffee house and listen to a good live band and buy their CD if you like their music. For the price of a coffee, I can listen to a small live concert for several hours while I do homework. You mean you can try before you buy? Amazing! The CD's I get from the local artists (and other independent artists that come through my area on tour) are much cheaper than the record-label CD's and the quality of music is sooo worth it. While the ethics of downloading the label's music is disputed, one thing I think we can all agree on is that the labels would have no ammo if people would just boycott them instead of refusing to purchase their crap and downloading music. Boycotts do work. And boycotts 'steal' nothing from the artists.

Re:The industry needs to changes its marketing str

[PReDiToR]

Assume that we all know filesharing is illegal, immoral and makes you fat.

Now take a look around you and see that not many people care and are doing it anyway.

You want to stop them doing it, considering the moral argument doesn't work?
Ask why they do it.
Then take that reason away from them.

If they continue to share, that wasn't really their reason.

The popularity of iTunes says that people are willing for pay for downloaded music.

I would suggest that the reason for this is that you can get the song you want at the price you want to pay, rather than getting a lot of stuff you don't want at a price that is too high for the whole.

Not wanting to listen to arguments doesn't make them any less valid, it only means you refuse to help out on either side of the battle.

Legally, the correct approach, but a foolish one

[reptilicus]

---Isn't this exactly what we asked for?---

Pretty much, and under the law, it's a reasonable approach. But in the long run, it's a futile one, and a foolish one.

First, the massive quantity of US lawsuits has caused no slowdown in p2p filesharing. So it's not an effective means of stopping copyright infringement.

Next, it's bad PR, and is turning off more and more consumers and artists from doing business with the major label cartels. It's also interesting that they continue to settle out of court, rather than letting any case go through. I think there's some fear on the RIAA and their equivalents' parts that a court case would 1) reinforce fair use rights and 2) set a precedent for the value of a song.

Most importantly, rather than seeing this as something that must be stomped out and trying to turn back the clock, a smarter approach is to find a way to profit from this obvious consumer demand. The same thing happened with the VCR, and now the MPAA makes more money from video sales and rentals than from box office receipts.

My opinion is they need to set up a system similar to this one [weedshare.com]. It takes advantage of the massive power of p2p, yet protects copyright and actively encourages users to only deal in legit files by giving them a financial incentive.

Re:The industry needs to changes its marketing str

[AK Marc]

It's like walking into a Wal-Mart, stuffing something in your coat, walking out, and justifying it by saying that they charge too much anyway.

No, it is not. It's more like not wanting to pay $5 to rent a movie that you've heard is bad, so you walk over to your friends house and borrow it. You've just screwed the movie company out of money and should be tossed in jail for "stealing" by not paying them every time you watch it.

Re:wi fi

[mark-t]

Downloading in and of itself isn't illegal.

Making a copy of copyrighted material without permission is what is illegal. Period. Encrypted or not. Protected or not. If it's copyrighted, and you do not have permission to copy it, and you go ahead and copy it, then you've broken the law.

Notwithstanding, there are allowances to make copies, even without explicit permission, under the jurisdictions of personal and fair use.

If the circumstances do not fit within those allowances, however, then the person who made the copy has violated copyright law.

Strictly speaking, this makes anyone who fileshares a work without permission a copyright infringer even before anyone else actually downloads it, since they have made a copy of the work (which exists on their hard disk), but that copy transcends allowable boundaries for personal/fair use, since that copy is being made available for public viewing, use, or copying, and so is in violation of copyright.

Re:wi fi

[Anonymous Coward]

"If my neighbour uses my wireless network (which I have kept open as a social service) to download copyrighted stuff, can I be sued????"

Obviously you can be sued, you can be sued for anything, as I'm sure we all know. But there's no reason to suppose you'd have any problems defending it in court.

You wouldn't settle for a stupid 'can't be bothered to let the court decide' amount like the people in this article, so there's no worry about the amounts involved.

And once people start asking serious questions, the responses range from
* It was him! (points to person logged using your network)
* Somebody stole my bandwidth. (you're not liable for crimes done in your car after it was stolen, or indeed, any other property)
** Negligence? what negligence? I'm not required by law to secure my internet connection.
* It wasn't me, even though it was through my computer. Ask all the spamming virus-infected Windows users whether they've been sued for computer crimes
* I'm a public service. Absolutely not involved. If you want to continue your investigation elsewhere you're welcome to sniff packets outside my house.
* I haven't made any unauthorised copies of a copyrighted work. Such copies were created at the request of whoever initiated the download and that wasn't me. (Your ISP, their ISP, 3 backbone networks and 3 ISPs at the other end are all using this argument, why should it be any different for a small network to a large one?)

Unfortunately you're probably in the USA, so you don't enjoy a fair legal system, but I imagine it's just a case of getting the thing before a judge as quickly as possible and saying "I committed no crime, I violated no copyright, I am not responsible for the actions of others"

Usual disclaimers apply. I don't know any more about US law than your dustbin does; you can tell it's not legal advice by looking at your bank balance before and afterwards.

Re:wi fi

[Laur]

sane people and organisations (and that includes the *AA's) will only start suing when they think they have a case.

Actually, since none of the cases have gotten anywhere near a courtroom the stregth of the *AA's cases has not been determined. In several cases it has been shown that the case is actually pretty laughable (suing Mac-using grandmothers, suing the dead, etc.). Truth is that the *AA's can sue with impunity because of the vast difference in resources between the *AA's and a private individual. In all cases it is cheaper to pay the "protection money" than fight it in court, even if you are in the right. It is unfortunate that this form of extortion is 100% legal

Re:wi fi

[Catbeller]

"And after an **AA person presents to the court a full audit of your network and sees your PCs as locked down but not your network...."

Read that again. The **AA is auditing my network. An industry group. Auditing. My. Network.

Not their province. I damn the laws that let INDUSTRY GROUPS conduct audits of MY PROPERTY. I gave them no such permission.

Get off of my property, varmint. Southwestern Bell doesn't get to monitor my phone conversations for defamation, and they bloody own the network. I will not stand for an industry rooting through my logs for possible cash making possiblities.

Re:Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. Yeah. At least if the law has any basis in the principle of reckless endangerment. Which, considering that would be its only justification to exist, it had better have.

Just look at it in reverse: should the person going 140 in a 60 zone during rush hour be penalized more heavily than the person doing 160 when it's deserted?

Re:Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you are unacquainted with copyright law.

So, if he thinks the punishment is not appropriate, he's 100% wrong no questions asked? Nice to see the Sheeple out in force today. Do you agree with every law because it's a law? Are there no laws you think the punishment for is unjust? Dissent is really tiresome to you, isn't it?

That fact that you think copyright infringement is such a terrible thing makes me think you've been living in a box your whole life and have never experienced real crime. If there's one thing worse than hearing millionaire celebrities bitch about pennies, it's the asshats who defend them.

Or do you think that doing 140 in a 60 zone at 4AM when there's nobody else on the road anyways should somehow be less of a cause for the police to impound your vehicle when they pull you over?

That's an interesting example, because speeding when you're the only person on the road is the safest time to do so, yet is the only time you can usually get punished. If there are many cars, speeding is more dangerous, but cops have a tough time using radar because they can't pinpoint one driver with their gun.

Re:Ouch

[Rei]

Could you please point out, if you would and just for the sake of argument, who the victim is in the case between a person downloading a song illegally and listening to it, vs. not listening to it at all? I.e., the general case of file sharing, as most of the people wouldn't have bought the music if they couldn't dl it...

I have an idea

[Jtheletter]

Let's just have all fines go directly to compensating the artists and production engineers, and only them, since they're the ones with the puppy-dog eyes that the music labels are telling us are starvng to death.

I guarantee all lawsuits would stop within a month once the soul-sucking corporations stopped getting their infinite percent cut.

It's a rant people, don't reply like this was a thesis statement, but seriously, when are we going to make them give up the "for the artists (children)" argument? I think if the court is going to rule in their favor it should also require them to publicly announce their true actions. Which are using the legal systems to prop up an outmoded business model and integrate profit margins that they otherwise would never have earned anyway.

Re:wi fi

[JonToycrafter]

Yes, but instead of opening the blocked ports, you could have configured Bittorrent to run on ANY OTHER port(s). The parent poster's point was that you COULD block the ports that Bittorrent normally runs on, but you could configure Bittorrent to run on other ports. There's no single port you can block to make a P2P program unusable.

Re:No

[phoenix321]

You sure it is? Would it be my responsibility if I leave a handgun lying around, someone takes it (preferably a minor in the household) and shoots someone, I'm responsible. So far so good.

Other question: if I leave my car unlocked, so it gets stolen and involved in an accident - am I responsible, too? Cars are dangerous things. Not as much as firearms, but can be devastating nonetheless. Assume it is my responsibility, too.

What about a box cutter on the front porch? Still dangerous and I'm responsible, eh? Allright, what about a bottle of whiskey? Wine? Beer? Could be dangerous to minors, I'm responsible, right? Think of the children! What about a bottle of milk? Some people are allergenic to lactose. It could go sour and get an unsuspecting thief (a child, maybe!) a sick stomach. Am I responsible?

After all, it boils down to three questions:
- to what extend can someone be held responsible when others misuse their property?
- how much can someone be held responsible for harm created by services, goods or anything else given away for free? - how "dangerous" is a regular IP connection? Like a handgun? Like a car or heavy powertool? Knife, alcoholic beverage? Milk?

I see an open Wifi-spot exactly as dangerous as an open public letterbox. Not even in the case of a serious letter bomb would one these people be sued a) the postal service for providing unchecked packet relay, b) the mailman, c) the person responsible for the letterbox, maybe a mall owner where that thing is located d) the manufacturer of paper, strings, stamps and glue.

What do we learn from that? Do not ever accept to take a letter/transmit an IP packet from your neighbors into town/to your gateway. Ignorance is negligence, openness is danger, sharing is stealing, not assuming the worst is abetting it, freedom is slavery. Thanks pal for reminding me. I'll register for re-education tomorrow, I promise!

Re:OMG OMG

[BackInIraq]

Until the laws are returned to something reasonable (like the original 28 years with no automatic extensions), I will continue to freely flaunt these laws without a touch of guilt. If they are going to abuse the system, I'm going to ignore it.

I think this is the prevailing attitude around here, not the "music should be free" or "it's not stealing anyway." And this is why most of us don't really care much for copyright holders, especially of the music and movie persuasion.

The second they started pounding nails into the coffin of fair use in the US (DMCA combined with CSS on video DVDs and all the various crackpot attempts to block copying on audio CDs), combined with extending copyright for such insane lenghts of time as to destroy the very idea of public domain (is anything in the public domain in the US? The Bible, maybe? And I hear Moses was filing for an extension...) has created the general "screw me? well screw you right back" attitude from the populace.

my solution

[circletimessquare]

i haven't bought a single cd since 1999 when i started using napster

many iterations of file sharing tools later, i'm on emule, and i have a simple solution to beating the riaa, et al:

i embrace world music, i let my mind wander

currently, i'm into filipino music (i live in new york city)

the thing to do is is to expand your musical interests to things beyond the usual pop crap, and you are also therefore using the new file sharing technology to its greatest benefit: connecting with resources that otherwise would be beyond your grasp in the pre-interent universe

embrace world music, screw the pop crap, and you win two ways:

1. you won't be on the riaa's radar

2. you'll grow new brain cells as you develop an awareness of a world beyond your nation's borders

there really is a lot of good stuff out there that isn't the usual robbie williams or britney spears crap

free your mind and give the bastards who want to market you sugar water the finger in the process

Sue for Misuse of Language

[xoboots]

"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."

If anything, it is the labels / artists who should have to pay fines everytime they rattle off phrases like that. I bet they don't use that sort of language in court. No one is stealing anything from anyone. There is no property that is being exchanged, nor has anyone's actions resulted in someone somehow losing any material item. They make it sound like every d/l song is a lost sale and that a lost sale should be counted as an asset. Maybe at Enron, but that's completely bogus.

What is happening is that people are illegally infringing on the labels / artists right to distribute (ie. copy) said material. That is not stealing. If someone goes into a library and photocopies an entire copyrighted book, they are infringing on the copyright owner's right to issue copies; however, that does not compare to the person who goes into a bookstore and removes from the bookstore, without paying, the same book. THAT is stealing! Both are committing an illegal activity but they are exceptionally different in character.

Besides, copyright is a stupid law to begin with.

Re:I think I speak for many UK residents in asking

[soliptic]

Oh yeah... RTFA, I didn't think of that! ;-)

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.

Looks like slsk is still below their radar (unsurprising, being 99% dedicated to non-major label stuff).

The trouble with the "they only go after uploaders" theory is that p2p stops working if people stop sharing. You can't say "it's alright, we can still get away with downloading", when nobody dares make their files available for you to download.

Re:Ouch

[Angostura]

The weasel word in your post there is 'most'. As in "most of the people wouldn't have bought the music".

I presume by most you didn't mean 51%, let's assume 0.5% shall we? (Too high? well, let's assume that filesharers only compete with online legal downloads (clearly falacious) and that the iTunes store is the only legal download site).

Apple's daily sales are about 1.39m tracks. Which works out at a daily loss of revenue of around $7,000.

That alone is probably worth paying a lawyer for, no? Just to make people think twice. And that's assuming zero impact on CD sales.

Yes these figure are speculative, but then so is your "most".

Re:Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

If I record a song in my garage, and make it available for download, I am competing directly with retail outlets. They must consider my service when setting their prices. My service devalues their goods. All copyright holders of music in the same genre are victims, because their property is worth less now. By your logic, recording and publishing my own stuff for free should be illegal.

Americans are hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

It is totally American to steal copyrighted content. The entire country was founded on it for goodness sakes. Prove me wrong. Did the US pay Britain for the land they essentially took? No of course not. Did they pay for all the books they copied, etc? No of course not.

In fact America was literally founded off of stolen technologies from Britain and other countries and that includes music. Now that other countries are doing it to them or are the average joe is following in their own illustrious footsteps they whine and complain and make laws to prevent exactly what there is a historical precedence for.

Here's something for you. What the RIAA and the MPAA are doing is totally UN-AMERICAN and flies in the face of what made the country the nation that it is today.