In a bid to crackdown on the illegal downloading of music files, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has filed thousands of new lawsuits against those it suspects of illegal file-sharing.
The IFPI has filed 8000 new lawsuits in 17 countries, mostly in Europe and South America. Some of the countries caught in this wave of lawsuits against downloading music illegally include, Argentina, Austria, Singapore, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany, plus others like Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Holland and Portugal. The net has certainly been cast far and wide as the music industry tries desperately to stop illegal downloading.
In certain countries such as Poland and Brazil, legal action against alleged file sharers is being taken for the first time after company revenues dropped by more than half. Most of this has been attributed to illegal music downloads. In Brazil alone, more than a billion songs were downloaded illegally just in 2005.
Through these lawsuits, the IFPI aims to target file sharers and file traders using P2P networks such as BitTorrent, eDonkey, Limewire and WinMX to name a few. This crackdown is aimed at targetting the uploaders who put their music files onto P2P (peer–to–peer) networks and is a part of the record industries continuing battle against illegal file sharing networks.
According to figures available with IFPI, the fear of spyware and viruses has proved as a very effective deterrent against the illegal downloading. Educating the people about the risks involved has also helped to reduce the illicit file sharing.
These actions are affecting a wide variety of people and even the parents whose children have been illegally downloading the music files have been targeted through these lawsuits.
This wave of lawsuits by IFPI has attracted fair amount of criticism from various sections of the people who argue that they are prejudiced in targeting individual internet users instead of the Internet service providers that host file-swapping sites.
The IFPI justifies its move by insisting that the threat of lawsuits will act as an effective deterrent to the practice of downloading from illegal sites and dissuade people from accessing P2P networks.
