Should we be worried?

[cheekybru]

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0...154507,00.html

:S I dont wanna pay 13 grand :'(

[Ste]

get yourself a decent lawyer. Judges don't know much about the internet...

"A virus got on my computer and downloaded songs maliciously while i was on holiday, it must have been a terrorist that put it there, yeh computer hacker child pornographer terrorist person..."

then plead insanity.

[IncubusGod]

To be honest I have never personally bought a single as they are stupidly bad value for money.

I was under the impression that single sales have been declining for the past 20 years as they have become less important overall.

I mean, look at the "feats" of "greatness" the spice girls, westlfe and busted have pulled by going to number 1 with each release. All you need is 150,000 or so singles to be sold and bingo, your there. Before you'd have needed three times that at least.

So its just oppertunism that these music organizations are claiming online downloading has affected the singles market, reducing sales by 50%. How the hell can you quantify that?

To be honest, if I like a band's album, I'll buy it. End of story. If I hear one or two tracks online then it would only make me want to buy it more.

Clearly this hard ass attitude of getting a 12 year old little girl to pay £12,000 in an out of court settlement was a ****ing disgrace. I only wish someone had fire bombed those greedy, armani suited sleeze bags offices.
I would have little sympathy for adult offenders who've been warned but persist. I can't imagine royally ****ing 12 year olds up is something most would condone (awaiting Dace joke)

[Sunday8pm]

Contest it on the argument that you are not profiting from this at all, in fact thanks to bandwith and isp costs you are far from profiting.

In Canada they got defeated on the basic argument that you cannot persecute file sharer's if they are not profiting from the items they are downloading.

Basically, it's hypocritical for them to target users who are sharing files to no profit now with regards to the internet when they previously never persued people copying a cassette tape, or everyone who was watching a rental of something etc etc.

Tell them to focus on the pirating community rather than the sharing community.

[Blastoderm]

I've read it this morning on Yahoo! I'm not worried, I'm not a heavy downloader.


EDIT: If they start prosecuting people and shut down download programmes, I'll sign up for Napster. £50-a-year for unlimited* download doesn't sound bad.






*Apparently

[Dante Hicks]

I am a reasonably heavy downloader and I'm not worried. If they can get £12k out of my bank account then they're better men than I (or any of my creditors, for that matter).

[Mek]

i cant believe how far the music industry will go for a bit of cash....thats just sad to even think about taking that money from a 12 year old girl....iam appauled

[Mek]

on a sidenote, if they didnt pay music singers so much money for mimeing their asses off on stage then they wouldnt be in this situation. i think pop singers (probably the most high paid) and rap/rnb singers are majorly overpayed for the crap they write, and then they wonder why nobody buys the singles....

[Phalon]

Pop singers like busted get fk all in comparison to what their songs actually make. Look at those muppets from Blue, last i heard (on MTV btw) two of them still lived at home with their parents. They get paid a fixed amount for each album and all the royalties go to the Simon Cowell/Louis Walsh - type person at the top.

[IncubusGod]

The amount of money you make from songs relates to writing credits. If you have a writing credit on the song, then you'll rake it in if the songs successful.

If you don't, then you get a set fee for singing, performing and promoting it.

Hence why those ****s from Blue get nothing, they don't write the songs. Someone else does and they get the large chunk of cash.
Same with SClub7, for example. After all their albums, songs, number 1's, concerts, TV shows they all ended up with about £250,000 each overall when they split up.
Why? Cause all they were were performers. They wrote nothing.

However the Busted case is hilarious. They had the cheek to suggest they wrote and performed their own songs on the first album.
When it was pointed out that they have no writing credits and didn't actually play most of the guitar pieces, they balked. They said the fact that the producers had the credits was 'a mistake', then said they thought about legal action. THEN said that everything was harmonious and as it should be. But still claimed to have written and performed the entire album.

Wankers.

So I hope they get no money. The ****s.

[Ste]

Figures show that we're buying albums in record numbers, despite the internet 'freeloaders',
Ok, that's Australia but I read somewhere that the same has happened in Europe and the US.

[roadrunner_0]

the other thing of course is that we actually pay more for music downloads than they do in american, or even in europe, so this is even more of a cheek really

[Proteus]

Don't worry - the ability of the record companies to extract large damages from downloaders is minimal in the UK. If they only have proof of you downloading, for instance, the maximum they can get is the actual damage done to them, i.e. the money they would have made if you'd bought the single (the price of the single minus all the costs it takes to make and distribute it). The amount is so low that any judge would throw out the case as a waste of the court's time. If they think they can do in the UK what they've done in the US, they're in for a shock.

[Ste]

Originally Posted by Proteus

Don't worry - the ability of the record companies to extract large damages from downloaders is minimal in the UK. If they only have proof of you downloading, for instance, the maximum they can get is the actual damage done to them, i.e. the money they would have made if you'd bought the single (the price of the single minus all the costs it takes to make and distribute it). The amount is so low that any judge would throw out the case as a waste of the court's time. If they think they can do in the UK what they've done in the US, they're in for a shock.

that cost * 15000 is significant though

[Proteus]

Originally Posted by Ste

that cost * 15000 is significant though

I doubt they'd be able to prove that you'd downloaded even remotely that many.

[Embroglio]

Lawyers for the phonographic industry say there is no excuse for downloading tracks illegally - as more than two-and-a-quarter-million have been bought legally on quality music sites set up by Napster and Apple.

there's a perfectly good excuse, record companies are charging in excess of £15 an album these days which is ridiculous

[Mek]

heres a quote from the bbc news story about it

Critics of the legal action say it is misleading to suggest that it is online piracy causing a slump in sales, and that it is a mistake to sue the very audience which is needed to support the industry.

i rest my case

[Mek]

Tom Dunmore, of Rip & Burn magazine, said it was not unlike the battle against taping music from the radio which was waged in the 1970s and 80s.

"What home taping did was make music fans of a whole generation of kids," he told Breakfast.

"There will always be that element of illegal copying going on."

He said that by targeting the biggest uploaders, the BPI was attacked the "biggest music fans".

"There's a logic behind getting that generation that is used to getting music for free to move over but there are other ways of doing it. Cutting prices is key."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3722428.stm


also, on the page there is a poll....suprisingly or not 81% are against sueing file sharers lol

[Embroglio]

"They are uploading music on a massive scale, effectively stealing the livelihoods of thousands of artists and the people who invest in them."

isn't really a valid arguement, the artists deserve a much higher share of the profits than they get, record companies who basicly use people for quick money then discard them are costing livelyhoods

[SYMM]

However the Busted case is hilarious. They had the cheek to suggest they wrote and performed their own songs on the first album.
When it was pointed out that they have no writing credits and didn't actually play most of the guitar pieces, they balked. They said the fact that the producers had the credits was 'a mistake', then said they thought about legal action. THEN said that everything was harmonious and as it should be. But still claimed to have written and performed the entire album.

Didn't McFly write a good deal of "early" Busted stuff?

[Vaio]

I am waiting for the list of kazaa usernames the BPI will announce as the hardcore 15%.

If Vaio768 appears on there then can anyone provide a safe house for 500gb of mp3s ?

~Vaio~

[Superpig #1]

If lee109 appears then no need to worry as ive shoved nearly everything on Minidisc

[Minty]

Originally Posted by Embroglio

there's a perfectly good excuse, record companies are charging in excess of £15 an album these days which is ridiculous

Indeed, they only cost in the region of 50 pence to make, it is stupid

[pablissimo]

All through that article I kept thinking it said British Pornographic Industry.

[Minty]

Originally Posted by pablissimo

All through that article I kept thinking it said British Pornographic Industry.

Same

Plus

The RIAA took action against a college student in Michigan who ran a network offering more than 650,000 files - the equivalent of more than 43,000 albums

I think I am safe

[Stew]

Originally Posted by pablissimo

All through that article I kept thinking it said British Pornographic Industry.

[Blastoderm]

They're really taking it seriously

[Proteus]

In Britain, music officials said the 28 uploaders have been identified only through their Internet accounts. They are heading to court to get the names and addresses before they can begin the legal proceedings.

Someone could make loads of money if they managed to start a completely anonymous ISP. I'm sure there's some way they could avoid knowing any details about their customers, and thus not be able to surrender such details on the order of a court (perhaps by not keeping any record of the phone numbers people use to connect and such like).

[skiddy]

I'm pleased the total files shared on my computer equals 98, 97 of which are open licenced bits of software.

[JonnyBGood]

The music industry says illegal file-sharing websites have hit their profits hard and they have no choice.

The poor little guys