Petteri Pyyny
7 Oct 2004 15:29
Music industry has taken its first major steps within Europe to clamp down the illegal music sharing over the P2P networks and 459 individuals have been sued across six European countries in raids today. Officials targeted British, Austrian, German, Italian, Danish and French P2P users. Music industry claims that they didn't target against casual downloaders, but instead the users who share (as opposed to download) major amounts of music across P2P networks. Users of Kazaa, eDonkey/eMule and Gnutella were amongst the users raided today.
The attack against individuals users comes after months of warnings from music industry's international organization, IFPI and its local counterparts, such as British BPI. "We are taking this action as a last resort and we are doing it after a very long public awareness campaign," said IFPI chairman Jay Berman. IFPI also stated that according to their statistics, 15 percent of P2P users are responsible of sharing over 75 percent of files available in P2P networks.
Danish P2P users were hit hardest this time -- 174 Danish P2P users were sued today. In Germany and Austria, 100 P2P users were sued in both countries.
Source: Reuters