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UK Music Industry to begin suing file-swappers?
Posted by Badri Natarajan on Wednesday, January 14 @ 19:43:12 EST File Sharing

Yahoo News reports that the UK music industry's trade organization, the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) is planning to start their own "sue file-swappers" campaign.

Much of the rationale for suing file-swappers remains the same as the American context, particularly since recent studies have implied that American file-sharing has decreased since the RIAA's lawsuit campaign began, while file-sharing in Europe has continued to increase. However, they will probably only resort to suing their customers if the introduction of European versions of iTunes Music Store and Roxio Napster do not succeed in reducing file-sharing.

Although file-sharing of copyrighted works is clearly illegal in the UK, just as it is in the US, it will be interested to see how such an initiative pans out in the UK with a very different legal structure. The UK has no DMCA, but it also does not have the extent of privacy protection afforded under US law, and the UK equivalent of fair use, known as "fair dealing", is a good deal narrower than the US copyright law provides. The extent of co-operation UK ISPs will provide without a court order also remains to be seen, and the BPI is believed to be currently negotiating this issue with ISPs..

It should be an interesting campaign to watch..

 
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Re: UK Music Industry to begin suing file-swappers? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, January 15 @ 16:45:52 EST
In the story, "a new UK copyright law" is mentioned, I assume the EUCD.

As is par for the course with an uninformed media, Yahoo states, "file-sharing has been criminalized [by the aforementioned but unnamed law]".

These all too common content-abbreviations are a thorn in the side of all who advocate the legal use of P2P and relish the social benefits decentralized networks can confer.

On the subject of BPI's negotiations with ISPs, lets hope the system works something like:
BPI sends notice of possible copyright violation to ISP>ISP sends notice to user with allegedly infringing IP address>log of notice is purged.

I think the ostensible threat of litigation (even without teeth) would deter misuse and alert unintentional infringers of their shared-file status while giving the ability to correct.

This is all until an ACS is introduced, of course...


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