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."

wi fi

[Virtual Karma]

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

Re:wi fi

[wdd1040]

If you knowingly keep your network open, you should be held accountable for all traffic on said network.

At least that's how the court would look at it.

Re:you know...

[moofdaddy]

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?

Because they are going after people for distributing. If you share a song to 100 people then you are liable for that song getting out there and all the damage to the company it causes.

I wonder how this will go down...

[eboot]

Hmm... How many people do you think they will sue? 10? 20? 1000? You know I don't know anybody who bothers to use p2p to pirate music anymore. There are easier ways to get old or indie albums by borrowing off of friends and everything new or mainstream is crap. My friends and I share music perfectly easy without P2P, in fact one of the first things I do with new friends is share our music collections with each other. The genie of digital copying is out of the bottle and it's going to take a lot of restriction to get it back in again. Enough restriction to destroy the music industry itself. Record sales aren't going to improve until the BPI or the RIAA stop stuffing crap down our throats, stop suing us and stop treating us like criminals, even if from their perspective we are. Society has changed, forever.

Only fining uploaders

[dappleyard]

I think It's important to note that it is generally only the uploaders who are being fined for their activities. A joe bloggs day to day downloader has nothing to worry about: "The UK internet users, ranging from a student to a local councillor, have admitted putting up to 9,000 songs each on the web for other fans to download."

Why didn't the parents fight?

[Ch*mp]

The BPI said some were parents and it was "highly likely" they settled on behalf of their children.

In the UK is this normal practice? - If you cannot crack the bat over the head of a minor, go looking for a parent.

If this had gone to court and the courts sided with the BPI, what sort of punishment would have been dished out, and who would be punished? - the minor, or the parent, or both?

Specifically, if the parent didn't know a crime was going on (meaning they genuinely didn't know their child was downloading copyrighted material), how can the parent be held accountable?

If the parent cannot be held accountable, in these circumstances, why the hell did they settle out of court?

--all typos created using myKeyboard(TM) (patent pending)

Re:Surefire way to eliminate all piracy!

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

An even better way: (read my sig)

http://www.mediachest.com

Share your collection face-to-face, or through the mail. Meet new people.

Re:Before the whining starts

[Kaa]

The music companies are totally right in doing this.

They do have LEGAL RIGHTS to do this, yes.

Whether they are MORALLY RIGHT is up to your particular morality, and there's a wide variety out there :-)

Yet another question is whether this is a RIGHT THING TO DO from a business viewpoint. Or from a public-good viewpoint. Again, answers vary.

I think I speak for many UK residents in asking...

[soliptic]

... which p2p networks are they monitoring? :o

Re:Ouch

[mark-t]

Ad hominem arguments aside...

I do agree with copyright law as it currently stands (or rather, as it stood before certain ammendments were put into it in recent years, such as the DMCA and the stupid Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act).

And by the way, just because I happen to advocate copyright infringement laws so strongly doesn't mean I'm ignorant to the fact that there are crimes that are orders of magnitude worse. But instead of trying to create a perfect world, let's just deal with the problems we can do something about as we encounter them, okay?

What is the concept of value? What is a patent?

[gelfling]

I bought a CD recently of 50 year old recordings. It hadn't been remastered or cleaned up in any way. I didn't special order order it but when I saw it I figured I'd never see it again. At any rate I'm the fool because I spent USD$23.95 + tax for a single CD. I'm left wondering though how many more fools like me are still around and what the fuck the record companies think the real world notion of value is? I mean, seriously - an old recording repressed to a CD with no post production, probably was sitting in the bins for 10 years and every 'artist' involved is probably dead by now. D'ya think the suits made their money on it, yet? Perhaps the only response we as consumers have is to try to press the copywrite owners into a patent-like situation where they get exclusive rights for a few years and then they lose all rights to the recording and we can do with it whatever we wish.