James Delahunty
21 Aug 2005 16:33
A spokesman for the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a body that represents music labels in the UK and International major record companies made a comment today that suggests the BPI actually sympathises with parents they file lawsuits against because of their kids online activity. "We genuinely feel sorry for parents who are caught up (in this) because their children have been file sharing illegally," he said. He was commenting on how Sylvia Price, a 53 year old mother was forced to settle because she couldn't afford to contest the lawsuit.
Her daughter Emily is only 14 years old, and has been accused by major record companies of illegally distributing copyrighted music over P2P networks. Her mother was shocked to discover that the BPI was suing her for this and is very displeased that the BPI didn't simply warn her daughter before taking legal action. "They should have sent something to saying 'if you keep doing this we will fine you' - they should have sent a warning first," she said. The BPI however, claims that people sharing music illegally had been initially contacted through messaging systems on file-sharing networks.
Now let's think about that claim for a second. Firstly, it would be absurd of the BPI to believe that all the warnings they send to P2P users actually reach the user. Most P2P software gives you the option to completely block incoming messages. This block is not there to block lawsuit warnings; it's there to block spammers who abuse the messaging systems to send millions of spam messages to users. For this reason, a lot of P2P users block all messages right after they install P2P software.
88 file sharers have been targeted by the BPI so far and according to the spokesman, 60 have already been settled. Nobody seems to want to contest the lawsuits despite the fact that many experts and lawyers call the evidence against users "weak", as all it has to go on is an IP address. It doesn't take into account the possibility that somebody else other than the account holder's family downloaded/uploaded the music or worse, the computer was hijacked and turned into a music file server. The latter happens everyday and accounts for a huge amount of "XDCC bots" on IRC for example.
Source:
BBC News