Matti Robinson
25 Jan 2008 5:47
The past eight years has been a struggle between the music industry and P2P downloads. Since Napster launched in 1999 and brought the peer-to-peer downloads to the mainstream, the International Federation of Phonographic Industry, more commonly known as IFPI, has been trying to stop the P2P revolution. Despite some radical acts to regain momentum for legit music downloads the recording industry is suffering a spiral downwards.
Digital sales have grown immensely and iTunes alone has sold more than 3 billion songs since the 2003 it launched. However, to put it in perspective the same amount of songs are being transferred each quarter of a year in P2P networks, and that doesn't include the downloads from the likes of BitTorrent and Usenet, reports Slyck News.
During last year, Internet Service Providers (ISP) have been under pressure. Even with the "get out of jail free"-card of DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which protects the ISPs from being responsible for the illegal traffic in their networks, some companies including US giant AT&T have voluntarily started to control their network traffic. The same goes for some European countries, one of which is France.
After the nearly ten years of battling it's becoming a fight for life and death with the last line of defense consisting of ISPs. This can be seen in comments by the Chairman of IFPI, John Kennedy: "2007 was the year ISP responsibility started to become an accepted principle. 2008 must be the year it becomes reality."