Lawsuits fly in internet song war

The battle between the record labels and music fans has reached Europe with the first wave of lawsuits against 247 people accused of sharing copyrighted songs over the internet.

The lawsuits, in Denmark, Germany and Italy, are against people who the record companies say offered hundreds or even thousands of music files for others to download online through "peer-to-peer" networks such as KaZaA and Gnutella.

Anyone found guilty could be fined thousands of euros.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), which is co-ordinating the actions, says similar lawsuits could follow in Britain.

Initially, the lawsuits are being lodged in the countries where CD sales have fallen most quickly.

The industry blames the decline on file-sharing and "domestic" piracy.

Johan Schluter, head of the Danish Recording Industry Association, blamed internet piracy for CD sales falling 50 per cent in four years. "People are losing their jobs, record stores are closing down and artists find it increasingly difficult to get their music released," he said.

More than 120 Danes, alleged to have been offering between a few hundred and up to 54,000 music files, are being sued.

Observers said the actions were being taken too soon, as Europe did not have enough legal download services to function as an alternative to the illegal sites.

Research in the US suggests file-sharing is not the cause of the music industry's problems.

Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Professor Koleman Strumpf of Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina compared the number of song downloads with CD sales in the autumn and winter of 2002, when file-sharing was rampant.

They found that file-sharing had "no statistically significant" effect on sales.

Their evidence suggested it took 5000 downloads to reduce album sales by one copy, so American CD sales should have fallen by two million copies in 2002. Instead, they fell by 139 million between 2000 and 2002, which, the professors say, must have some other cause.

In the US, where 2000 lawsuits have been filed, there was outcry when one accused was revealed as a girl who had downloaded nursery rhymes. Another was a grandmother who had never used her computer.

But IFPI head Jay Berman said that although polls showed 65 per cent of people knew file-sharing of copyrighted music was illegal, the lawsuits had become necessary.

- INDEPENDENT