British Music Industry Issues Warning to Music Sharers

The British Phonographic Institute (BPI) has stated in a new report (linked below) that, of the 8 million people downloading music in the UK, 7.4 million of them are doing it illegally. That’s right – 92% of you out there using music services are pirates. They also claim that people who download music spend 32% less of albums and CDs, and 59% less on singles.

To protect artists’ and record labels’ incomes they are prepared to take “serial filesharers” to court.

Backing this up, the BPI also issued a chilling warning to filesharers: stop downloading music illegally, or we’ll send you unwanted instant messages. They are proposing an IM service that warns uploaders that they are breaking the law and advises them to disable their file sharing clients.

BPI Report (Adobe Acrobat PDF)

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?