Film theft in the UK - Future of Copyright

settled by the end of 2003.
In January 2004, a US survey of 1,400 Internet
users by the Pew Internet & American Life
Project and comScore Media Metrix, a Web
tracking firm, found that the percentage of
Americans who download music online has
halved since the lawsuits began. Whereas 29%
of Internet users surveyed in May 2003 had said
they sometimes download songs to their
computers, by December 2003, this figure had
dropped to 14%. The figures also showed that
the usage of Kazaa fell 15% from November
2002 to November 2003, whilst other P2P
networks also experienced usage declines. The
drop at BearShare, was 9%, while WinMX lost
25% of its audience and Grokster plunged 59%.
Though Mitch Bainwol, the chairman and CEO
of the RIAA, openly embraced the findings, the
figures have been greeted with mixed reaction.
Rob Glaser, the chief executive of
RealNetworks, which makes software that plays
music and video, has pointed out that in light
of the lawsuits there is likely to be
unwillingness amongst downloaders to admit
to their activity. Cindy Cohn, legal director for
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lobbying
civil liberties group, has echoed these
sentiments, saying that most people are aware
of the RIAA lawsuits, so “probably figure telling
a stranger on the phone about their
downloading isn't a very good idea”.
P2P monitoring firm BigChampagne
meanwhile has said that its empirical evidence
shows that the use of services like Kazaa, both
in terms of the number of users and in terms of
the volume of material, is still rising
dramatically.
There is also the possibility that some of the
decline in use of the likes of Kazaa, Grokster
Bearshare has been due to users moving on to
new P2P protocols such as eDonkey, BitTorrent,
and Overnet (see Chapter 4).
Whether or not the RIAA lawsuits are working
to reduce filesharing is open to debate. What is
clear is the importance of educating the
consumer and raising awareness. What the
RIAA lawsuits have also highlighted is the
negative publicity generated for an industry
should it litigate against potential customers.
The RIAA is meanwhile proceeding with the
lawsuits against individual P2P users into 2004.
In the UK, the BPI has so far kept its lawsuits to
more PR-friendly defendants. In April 2003, the
organisation scored a legal victory against
EasyInternet Café, when the latter agreed to
pay compensation to the record industry for
copyright infringement. EasyInternet had been
charging customers to burn illegally
downloaded tracks from the Internet onto
recordable CDs.
However, in January 2004, the BPI caused a
public backlash, when it took legal action
against websites offering cheap CDs. It alleged
that CDWow.com, whose business model is
based on buying legitimate products in
cheaper territories and offering them for sale
into the UK, was breaching EU importation
laws, and forced the supplier to substantially
up its prices. Much of the press surrounding
the litigation, which was settled out of court,
painted the BPI in a very negative, anticonsumer
light. In terms of P2P, the BPI recently
made clear that it would soon follow the RIAA’s
experience, and adopt a strategy of suing
individual users.
According to the IFPI 71 , the music industry's
campaigns against illegal file-swapping have
sharply raised public awareness both in the US
and in Europe. In a recent IFPI-commissioned
survey of consumers in four major European
markets – Denmark, France, Germany and UK –
more than two thirds of respondents stated
they were aware that distributing music online
without permission is illegal and an average of
54% of consumers surveyed support legal
action being taken against infringers. These
very high levels of awareness are put down to
the escalation of the industry's Internet antipiracy
efforts in 2003. In addition to lawsuits
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