Quote:
German police swoop on file-swappers
BERLIN (Reuters) - Police in Germany have made their first bust of an exchange for swapping computer music files, says the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Police in the southern town of Fuerth said they had confiscated eight computers after investigations initiated by the German branch of the IFPI led them to the house of a 25-year-old computer programming student.
The IFPI said the man was using a clone of a Napster file-sharing server to distribute over a million MP3 music files daily to some 3,000 individual users over a period of weeks.
The man has since been charged with infringing copyright laws and faces a possible jail sentence if found guilty.
The IFPI, a global trade group representing major and independent music labels and publishers, says the raid should set alarm bells ringing among pirate music distributors, who have long sought ways of sidestepping the record companies.
"This sends out the signal that anyone distributing music illegally will be caught, and that they would therefore be best advised to concentrate on legal methods of distribution," IFPI spokesman Hartmut Spiesecke told Reuters.
A boom in music file-sharing began in 1999, when college student Shawn Fanning invented Napster, a computer programme enabling users connected to the same server to directly download MP3s from one another.
Napster later became mired in a welter of litigation over copyright infringements, but the music industry responded to the demand for Internet music-sourcing by starting their own online paying services such as PressPlay and MusicNet.
Earlier this week Apple Computer said its iTunes Internet music store had sold more than a million songs at 99 cents each in its first week of business.
Spiesecke said the IFPI had calculated that about 620 million MP3s were illegally downloaded in Germany alone in 2002.
"If all those songs were translated into sales, we'd be looking at about one billion euros in lost revenue," he said.
The last line really highlights the arrogance and naiivety of the "industry". What they fail to realise is alot of songs are downloaded for purposes of evaluation, and quite often will result in a CD sale if I like the song, or album, etc. There is NO WAY IN THE WORLD you can read into this there is that much lost revenue.