Artciel Summary: 'Can Filesharers Be Made to Pay?' By Adam Webb

The key points of this article (published on Thursday 22nd March 2007, The Guardian) are:

• The music industry is beginning to understand that lawsuits don't deter pirates and that it must find ways to make money from P2P sharing.
• P2Plawsuits.com is a website allowing American college students accused of uploading copyrighted music to peer-to-peer networks the opportunity to settle upfront and out of court.
• It's the latest initiative by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its fight against online piracy.
• The RIAA began legal actions against US citizens in June 2003, and its current strategy of targeting college campuses has created a wave of new headlines - most of them negative.
• At the time that the RIAA started making noises about suing individuals, the British Phonogrpahic Industry (BPI) waited until the law was clear and a legitimate download business was in place.
• The first of these cases, in January last year, resulted in a landmark legal ruling, with two men ordered to pay £5,000 and £1,500 respectively for copyright infringement. Additional costs and damages were estimated at up to £20,000.
• According to Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, a media analysis company that specialises in monitoring P2P traffic, around 1bn tracks are traded illegally each month.
• However, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reckons that about 20bn tracks were illegally shared last year.
• The likelihood of you being caught of filesharing is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid.
• The BPI's chief executive, Geoff Taylor says, "we never expected these actions to wipe out illegal filesharing on their own, but they've done much to raise awareness about the illegality of distributing music over the internet using P2P networks, and have been effective in changing many consumers' behaviour."
• It is "likely" that legal actions will continue this year.
• The music industry is pressing ISPs to cut off people it identifies as filesharers. That has met with a distinctively cool reaction from ISPs, who do not see it as their job to do the BPI's enforcement.
• Traditional P2P networks such as Limewire and Morpheus are still operational, but an increasing volume of song swapping now takes place via closed social networks or MP3 blogs.
• Behavioural traits synonymous with P2P - such as sharing, discovery and interaction - have now been appropriated and are the bedrock of a whole raft of Web 2.0 businesses, from MySpace and YouTube to Last.FM and Pandora.
• Hundreds of millions of consumers have evolved their behaviour and are consuming media in a much different and more legitimate way when they used to.
• The music industry is adapting to these evolving consumption models and signing content deals often based on a cut of advertising. It has to - the revenue hole from falling CD sales is not being plugged by iTunes downloads.
• Yet-to-be-launched "legal" P2P networks (ie users will be able to swap DRM-encoded tracks) QTrax and Mashboxx have all signed deals with major labels.