Film theft in the UK - Future of Copyright

68
against hundreds of large-scale Internet users,
the campaign has included the dispatch of
millions of 'instant messages' emailed to fileswappers'
computers, mass information
campaigns in colleges and universities in over
20 countries, and the launch of the
international educational website
www.pro-music.org.
The IFPI also claims that the anti-piracy
campaign has dented Internet piracy levels
worldwide. After doubling to 1 billion files
between 2002 and the start of 2003, the
number of files illegally on the Internet at any
one time has fallen over the last nine months
by 20% to 800 million in January 2004.
However, the organisation acknowledges that,
while the overall fall in the number of files on
peer-to-peer services is driven by a sharp
reduction in files on the best-known FastTrack
network (which hosts the Kazaa service), there
has been an increase in the number of files on
other peer-to-peer networks.
Education and consumer
awareness
The music industry has never quite got its act
together in terms of educating the consumer –
fostering a siege mentality, relying on litigation
to educate, choosing to concentrate on
lobbying government.
In the UK, the BPI has been carrying out a
programme of regular visits to CD
manufacturing plants, record companies and
enforcement groups around the country. The
organisation has also been staging one-off
events, such as hosting a stand at the North
East Fraud Forum in March 2003 to profile antipiracy
activities to the audience of delegates.
The organisation has also been involved in
supporting cross-industry initiatives, and was
instrumental in ensuring that the private
member’s bill – Copyright, etc and Trade Marks
(Offences and Enforcement) Act 2002 –
became law in November 2002 (see Chapter 5).
Elsewhere, individual music majors have been
lobbying of their own accord. For example,
Alain Levy, the CEO of EMI, has been drumming
up support for the fight against piracy in
Brussels for some time. It is believed that this
was instrumental in getting the European
Council to pass its anti-piracy resolution in
March 2003.
Legitimate online services
As of mid 2003, there were no more than ten
legitimate online music services offering
anything resembling a realistic consumer
proposition. Of these, the most prominent
have been AOL MusicNet, which costs $8.95
per month and already has over 100,000
subscribers, MusicMatch and RealOne
Rhapsody.
The music industry’s own direct efforts to offer
online services have somewhat dried up, with
the much touted Pressplay.com website now
leading straight to the reborn legitimate
Napster website. Pressplay in its original form
was a good example of the music industry
getting the online business proposition wrong.
It tried to operate on a monthly subscription
basis; the problem was that if you cancelled
your subscription, all the files you had
downloaded would cease to function and your
investment became worthless.
However, the real light at the end of the tunnel
has proved to be Apple’s iTunes online music
service. The iTunes Music Store was launched in
April 2003 in the US, selling music files encoded
using a proprietary format (not the widely used
MP3 format) at 99 cents per track. Initially only
available to Apple Mac users in the US, and
subsequently extended to Windows PC owners,
iTunes was an immediate success. By the end of
December 2003, 25 million songs had been
downloaded on the service, with downloads at
the end of 2003 averaging around 1.5 million
per week – translating into about 75 million
downloads a year on an annualised basis. US