p2pnet - rss feed: Big Music anti-piracy war
p2pnet.net News:- Any lingering doubts as to whether or not the record label cartel has embarked on an all-out, across the board war against former clients to bludgeon them into buying ‘product’ have been dispelled.
Today, its IFPI faux-police unit opened 459 “legal actions” against file sharers in the UK and France, bringing the total number of casualties in Europe to more than 650 in six countries.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has just filed against 762 people in the US. The total number of victims there, all ordinary men, women and children, is now close to 5,800.
Compounding that, 174 suits have been opened in Denmark, 50 in France, 100 in Germany, seven in Italy, 28 in the UK and, for the first time, 100 in Austria, says Big Music’s IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industries).
It also says cases have been launched in Canada. In reality, a single case was opened in which the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) demanded that a Canadian court hand over the identities of 29 people it claimed were, “illegally distributing hundreds if not thousands of music copyright files to millions of strangers”.
The case was tossed out and is now under appeal.
The IFPI is fronting for three of the four members of the Big Four record label cartel - Warner (US) , UMG (France) and EMI (UK). The fourth member is Sony-BMG (Japan and and Germany).
An exhorbitant dollar per download
The IFPI announcement was heralded by an earlier one from another alphabet agency, the UK-based BPI (British Phonographic Industry).
The contention is: file sharers are sharing music owned by the copyright holders, namely, the Big Four record labels and their many and varied associate and subsidiary firms around the world, in the process “devastating” the multi-billion-dollar music industry, as the CRIA once put it.
The present criminal and civil suits are, “aimed at ‘uploaders’ - people charged with putting hundreds of copyrighted songs on to internet file-sharing networks and offering them to thousands or millions of people world-wide without permission from the copyright owners,” says the IFPI.
It blithely ignores the fact that every one of the people being pilloried would happily buy ‘product’. They are not, however, willing to pay an exhorbitant dollar per download - and a lot more in Europe - for low quality compressed, and often lossy, mp3 tracks.
Mp3s are fine for mobile music players and PCs, but they’re no good for high fidelity - or even medium fidelity - sound systems.
People buy CDs and, more latterly, DVDs for quality listening, as they’ve always done, notwithstanding the fact the music industry often charges out-of-sight prices for discs which frequently have only two or three, at the outside, decent tracks - just as they used to do in the good old days of vinyl recordings.
Be that as it may, file sharers and other music lovers are buying physical product.
An Associated Press story points out, “[…] a gradual turnaround in U.S. music sales that began in the fall [2003] has picked up in the first quarter of this year, resulting in the industry’s best domestic sales in years.
“Overall U.S. music sales - CDs, legal downloads, DVDs, etc. - were up in the first three months of the year by 9.1 percent over the same period in 2003, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Album sales were up 9.2 percent. Sales of CDs, which represent 96 percent of album sales, rose 10.6 percent.”
Music industry sales in other parts of the world are reporting similar growth figures.
The IFPI claims file-sharing has contributed to the decline in global music sales - down $6 billion in the US in the past five years, it states. But it doesn’t say how it arrives at that figure. It’s never been shown how a file shared online equals the loss of a single sale.
Rather, “Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates,” say Felix Oberholzer (Harvard Business School) and Koleman Strumpf (UNC Chapel Hill) in their empirical analysis The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales.
They also state:
“The economic effect is also small. Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale.”
In the meanwhile, the Net has given people something they’ve never had before - perfect freedom of choice.
They’re exercising it.
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See:-
all ordinary - Big Music vs Ordinary Folks, p2pnet, August 20, 2004
victims - RIAA sues another 762, p2pnet, October 1, 2004
France - French file share attack, p2pnet, September 30, 2004
earlier one - Big Music vs UK file sharers, p2pnet, October 7, 2004
physical product - 3 Myths About the Recording Industry Debunked, LA Weekly, September 24-30, 2004
thrown out - Keep on swapping! Cdn file sharers told, p2pnet, March 31, 2004
turnaround - U.S. music sales continue to rise despite piracy, Associated Press, April 9, 2004
indistinguishable from zero - The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales - An Empirical Analysis
