p2pnet - rss feed: Big Music sues German file sharer
p2pnet.net News:- An unnamed 23-year-old German has been ordered by a court to pay e8,000 ($9,855) plus costs for copyright infringement, says the German Federal Association of the Phonographic Industry in Berlin, quoted in Deutsche Welle here.
Although the Big Five - one of whom, BMG, is based in Germany - have sued close to 3,000 people in the US, none of the cases has been heard by a judge.
Big Music’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) always asks its victims - ordinary people rather than the hard-core criminals Big Music portrays them to be - if they want to settle out of court.
And they always do, in which case they usually pay the RIAA $2,000 to $3,000 (although in some cases, the amounts are much higher) rather than risk having to pay legally imposed fines of up to $750 per song if they go up against its heavyweight legal teams and lose in court.
No one knows what happens to the money the RIAA gleans from the settlements - almost 500, so far - but it doesn’t go to the artists whose rights the RIAA claims to protect.
“The case, one of 68 brought against people who download music illegally in Germany, represents a significant victory for a music industry,” says Deutsche Welle.
‘Sue ‘em all’
In the US, it would seem, while the music industry claims its sue-’em-all campaign is dramatically reducing the number of file sharers, at a conservative estimate, four million people are online at any given moment uploading, downloading and/or sharing one billion files every month, says the research company Big Champagne.
Nor is the music industry’s contention that file sharing is “devastating” the multibillion-dollar music industry, as it claims, accurate.
The music industry’s statistical analysis techniques seem to vary, depending on the state of the moon. Be that as it may, in March, in their celebrated The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales An Empirical Analysis, Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf revealed:
“Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.”
A Canadian study says file sharing is increasing
“There’s been no decline in the number of people file-sharing,” states Chris Colman, European managing director for Sandvine, whose technology monitors p2p traffic and usage patterns.
“The company’s research indicates that the proportion of total net traffic used for peer-to-peer sharing has declined only slightly in the US over the last year, from 70 to 65 per cent.
“Furthermore, file-sharing in Europe has not dropped at all - it now accounts for 70 to 80 per cent of net traffic,” says the company, “And internet usage in both the US and Europe is still growing, meaning that file-sharing is growing overall.”
