Big Music warns UK file sharers
p2pnet.net News:- Big Music’s BPI ( British Phonograph Industry) claims eight million people of Britain’s population of 58.8 million (2001) are downloading music, and that 92% of them (7.4 million) are using “illegal sites”.
In an amazing coincidence, yesterday, US music industry truth adjustor Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said a study shows 97 to 98% of the traffic on p2p systems is illegal.
“There is no clearer evidence of the damage that illegal downloading is doing to British music and the British music industry,” says BPI chairman Peter Jamieson.
“Illegal filesharing is causing real financial damage to artists, to songwriters, to record companies, publishers, retailers and everyone involved in the business.”
Now, says Jamieson, the BPI will copy failed efforts by the RIAA and CRIA (the Big Five record labels’ Canadian and US enforcement units) to quell file sharing by sending out ‘instant messaging’ threats “warning uploaders that they face court action if they do not disable file-sharing software on their computers,” says the BPI.
“There is no excuse whatsoever for people taking music without permission,” says Jamieson.
“There are literally hundreds of thousands of tracks available on legal internet music services in the UK, and the number of tracks available and the number of services providing them grows weekly.”
Hundreds of thousands of tracks?
At any given moment, four million simultaneous users around the world are logged on to p2p networks, and around BILLION (1,000,000,000) files are shared every month, says Eric Garland, ceo of Big Champagne. Unique users? More than 20 million each and every month.
And p2p file sharers have millions of music files from cultures and artists all around the world to choose from, not just the 250,000 – 500,000 tired tracks offered by the Big Music-backed online stores at a dollar a download.
