European file sharing lawsuits starting up

[reddshack]

Read article HERE for info on it.

It's rather interesting...... "459 lawsuits in Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy and Austria."

[necroGL]

so thats 459 out of about 500 million.......... I like those odds

[Haku]

Surely they can't be placing the entire blame of record sales dropping soley on internet downloading? especially with the amount of complete pap that's being produced (read manufactured) and heavily marketed; boy bands, girl bands, Pop Idol etc.

[necroGL]

yea but most of that dont get downloadded anyway just bought by idiots that dont know ripped off music by talentless artists

[Prosperus]

And the worst thing of all is that CD sales are actually UP from last year. They're doing better business than they've had and they're still complaining. It's fine though, the odds are against them, and for every ridiculous lawsuit they bring that's several customers they actually lose compared to the "lost revenue" from filesharing which can't be proven. At this point I have forbidden my entire family and my girlfriend from buying new CD's or iTunes. Boycott them all. Let's see who's laughing last when the record industry has completely alienated their consumer base and crumbles to the ground subsisting solely on the settlements from bogus lawsuits...

p2pnet.net is a great resource on all this stuff.

[NPswimdude500]

well, see, they could argue that cd sales are up because there are laws against downloading this year, but still....

[andrewmel]

I wonder why bands go to record labels anymore, why cant they just set up their own websites, use paypal to sell the wma or mp3, and market themselves........ i guess that wont work for the boyband or girlband pap but should work for other more underground artists, especially if they can send stuff to the radio stations and get them to play them....

[exon]

I love living in Canada, I don't live in fear of these lasuits. Its actually ok to download the music, we just can't upload anything. The goverenment has put a Tariff on recoardable media, which make a lot more sence then trying to stop the sharing of music all together. I haven't ready anything about it in a while so it might have changed slightly.

[XavierGr]

Originally Posted by exon

I love living in Canada, I don't live in fear of these lasuits. Its actually ok to download the music, we just can't upload anything. The goverenment has put a Tariff on recoardable media, which make a lot more sence then trying to stop the sharing of music all together. I haven't ready anything about it in a while so it might have changed slightly.

I dont agree with this. What about if you want to make a copy with YOUR data and YOUR music samples?

[Exo]

To be fair, the BPI in the UK are only chasing 28 people.
As an example, one of those 28 "file sharers" owns over 11,000 tracks and is responsible for a significant amount of uploading traffic.

The way I see it, it's "tongue in cheek time" to download a few hundred tracks for your own personal use, but to have that many and be blatant on sharing it takes the p155.

I can't say I feel sorry for those being pursued, I know I'm contradicting myself since I've also used p2p and the whole idea of p2p is to share, but some of these guys just took it to another level.

[FlameGrilled]

I really don't give a damn what they try to do - they can't touch me, as everything i have on digital is safe, accounted for... licensed and legal in every sense.

I even got written permission for my analogue transfers - so they can't even hit me for those.

Not that i fileshare audio and video and anything copyright-to-someoneelse anyway.

However, like Exo puts it - examples of people who are literally trafficking material, such as Exo refers to, deserve what they get - hopefully the book thrown at them (if the book is the collected works of the Encylopedia Brittanica or similar, that's gonna hurt).

And if the bodies in question aint got the wotsits to make the real abusers suffer badly, well.. i guess i could always volunteer to solve their problem :P

AndrewMel :-

I dunno what planet you live on, but here on planet Earth.. not everyone has nice convenient high-speed internet connections, some who do have internet connectivity do it by web tv boxes and other thin-client type access over dialup and equally not much better narrow broadband.

A huge amount of the music fan market is still using CD & cassette primarily - and they aint gonna be ditching everything in favour of ripped-off downloads if they aint got convenient ways to access it.

You honestly think the people with quality-first issues are gonna settle for commericial (be it indepently produced or big-label produced) 'seconds' grade audio when they could rightfully expect a proper uncompressed copy for their hard-earn't cash..??

Anyway - the simple reality of the 'post it, charge a small sum, cut out the middle man' comes down to this :-

BANDWIDTH and TRANSFER LEVELS - If you produced something really good and self-marketed it by the web, as sure as dung stinks, you'll find yourself playing a massive catch-up game to provide a decent grade of hosting for your goods - and that costs money, quite a bit of it, to allow for the on-demand impact that'll happen.

Again, i don't know which planet you exist on, but here on planet Earth.. it's only the been-there-done-it's (outfits like Marrilion and sucessful players in the music game) that totally bypassed the commericial big-league labels, as those kinda people can afford to take the chance on big-scale hosting. Ms or Mr Bloggs (the generic, 'i think i can sing.. and hey i look totally hot' no-hopers) of the pop idol wannabes world dont have that kinda money floating, and so they almost certainly end up in the hands of the big-league labels.

If it was as straightforward as you seem to think it is, the commericial big-players label setup would have died years ago due to independents.

Actually, i could think of better destinations for the 'pop idol' wannabees, but there's already enough selfish minded people in Hell already