[Sunday Business Post] Irish music industry hit by downloading (1 Viewer)

[pete]

Eircom taken to court over illegal music downloads

Mary Carolan
Four major record companies have brought a High Court action aimed at compelling Eircom to take measures to prevent its networks being used for the illegal downloading of music.
The case is the first in Ireland aimed at internet service providers, rather than individual illegal downloaders.
Eircom is the largest broadband internet service provider in the State.
Latest figures available, for 2006, indicate that 20 billion music files were illegally downloaded worldwide that year. The music industry estimates that for every single legal downloaded, there are 20 illegal ones.
Due to illegal downloading and other factors, the Irish music industry is experiencing "a dramatic and accelerating decline" in income, with the Irish market suffering a decline in total sales from €146 million in 2001 to €102 million last year, said Willie Kavanagh, managing director of EMI records (Ireland) and chairman of the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA).
Mr Kavanagh told the High Court he would attribute a substantial portion of that decline to illegal peer-to-peer downloading services and the increasing availability of broadband internet access.
The record companies are also challenging Eircom's refusal to use filtering technology or other measures to voluntary block, or filter, material from its network that is being used to download music in violation of the companies' copyright and/or licensing rights.
Eircom's lawyers said the company was not on notice of specific illegal activity that infringed the rights of the companies and had no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network.
Mr Kavanagh said that, "with the greatest of respect" to Eircom, it was "well aware" its facilities were being used to violate the property rights of record companies "on a grand scale".
Mr Justice Peter Kelly today admitted the proceedings - brought by EMI Records (Ireland), Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Ireland), Universal Music (Ireland) and Warner Music (Ireland) against Eircom - into the list of the Commercial Court.
In the action, the companies want orders - under the Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000 - restraining Eircom from infringing copyright in the sound recordings owned by, or exclusively licensed to them, by making available (through Eircom's internet service facilities) copies of those recordings to the public without the companies' consent.
© 2008 ireland.com

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/breaking/2008/0310/breaking61.htm

 

[dudley]

thumped in the news again
we're all getting sent down

 

[Scientician 0.8]

I knew we shouldn't have started the child pr0n ring.

 

[RED(tape)MENACE]

thumped in the news again
we're all getting sent down

What?
Where?

 

[dudley]

rte news at 9.
everytime rte do a piece on illegal downloading they show someone downloading an mp3 offa thumped

 

[ratmonkey]

Was it the exact same footage they used last time?

 

[avernus]

rte news at 9.
everytime rte do a piece on illegal downloading they show someone downloading an mp3 offa thumped

haha amazing

 

[Bren.Manazo]

"Latest figures available, for 2006, indicate that 20 billion music files were illegally downloaded worldwide that year. The music industry estimates that for every single legal downloaded, there are 20 illegal ones"

Assuming these figures are correct then I think thats a real shocker of a statistic!

 

[Mormon Nailer]

"Latest figures available, for 2006, indicate that 20 billion music files were illegally downloaded worldwide that year. The music industry estimates that for every single legal downloaded, there are 20 illegal ones"

Assuming these figures are correct then I think thats a real shocker of a statistic!

Why?

 

[pete]

Griffin's idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers -- something like $5 per user per month -- and put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels. A collecting agency would divvy up the money according to artists' popularity on P2P sites, just as ASCAP and BMI pay songwriters for broadcasts and live performances of their work.
The idea is controversial but -- as Griffin and Jenner point out -- hardly without precedent. The concept of collecting a fee for unauthorized use of music was developed in France in 1851 as a way of reimbursing composers whose work was being performed without their permission in cafes and the like.


The practice spread to the United States in 1914 and currently applies to radio airplay and webcasts in addition to live performances. In a 2004 white paper, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called for it to be applied to file sharing, but the Recording Industry Association of America immediately dismissed the proposal.
Things are different now. "The labels are beginning to like the idea of an access-to-music charge," says Jenner, who once managed Pink Floyd and the Clash, "because they're increasingly aware that their current model is broken." U.S. music sales, which peaked in 1999 at nearly $15 billion, dropped to $11.5 billion in 2006. Last year's figures are still being tallied, but with CD sales cratering and online sales overwhelmingly dominated by singles, the only question is how far they'll fall.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/03/music_levy

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/03/music_levy

Pure bonkers.

 

[Gambra]

There's a good piece in today's Guardian Technology section about the future of "free" music. Inverted commas intended as it's not free of course.

 

[CitySickness]

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/03/music_levy

Not a chance. If the ISPs agree to this, they'll have set a precedent whereby the movie studios and television companies can then demand their own "piracy levy" (let's call it an even $10, seeing as how DVDs are sometimes more expensive than CDs). After that comes the software piracy levy, whereby Adobe gets a $30p/m levy because lots of people download Photoshop illegally.

 

[GO]

Dear record industry: blow me.
Sincerely, Everybody



LOL

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

There's a good piece in today's Guardian Technology section about the future of "free" music. Inverted commas intended as it's not free of course.

If only there were some way of letting people know where that piece was by posting a sequence of characters that would indicate where it was.
Damn.

 

[Gambra]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/13/internet.google

Took me a whole three seconds to find.

Listen now, pay never

With CD sales plummeting and digital failing to make up for losses, Owen Gibson looks at the concept of 'free' — anathema to record labels, but a rallying cry to others

 

[aoboa]

Listen Now - Pay Never

So, just like the radio.

 

[pete]

Trying to find out how much money Radiohead made from the digital release of In Rainbows was like pulling teeth, but Trent Reznor has made no secret of how the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV has sold. According to the band, 800,000 transactions generated $1.6 million in sales revenue in the first week of the album's availability, despite the fact that the 36-song version of the album is widely available on torrent sites. Nine Inch Nails included free downloads in these figures, which are not being released to SoundScan in the traditional manner, according to Billboard.
Ghosts I-IV is currently the top-selling album on the Amazon MP3 store; again, Reznor paid approximately $38 to have it distributed there.

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/03/nine-inch-nai-2.html

 

[pete]

more from the sunday business post:

http://thepost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=NEWS+FEATURES-qqqm=nav-qqqid=31261-qqqx=1.asp

and some analysis from digitalrights.ie

http://www.digitalrights.ie/2008/03...ltering-for-the-music-industry-is-a-bad-idea/

 

[Mormon Nailer]

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/14/riaas-unethical-inve.html

RIAA's unethical investigations to be dragged into the open in court case

Posted by Cory Doctorow, March 14, 2008 12:34 PM | permalink

Tanya Andersen, a single mom in Oregon who was unsuccessfully sued by the RIAA, is countersuing, and her lawyer is planning to use the suit to drag all the tawdry details of the RIAA's sneaky, unethical "investigation" techniques into the open: Lybeck tells Ars that he'll be digging into agreements between the RIAA, RIAA member companies, MediaSentry, and the Settlement Support Sentry. Part of that will involve looking at compensation, like how much MediaSentry gets from each settlement. "I'd love to know what kind of bounty MediaSentry got paid to supply erroneous identities to the RIAA," Lybeck says. One of the allegations in the amended complaint will involve MediaSentry's status as a private investigator. "MediaSentry claims it is able to gain access to people's hard drives without their permission and collect information," notes Lybeck. "It's illegal because they're not licensed to do that work."
The amended complaint and subsequent discovery will also focus on what Lybeck calls the "flawed nature" of the RIAA's investigations. "We know [the RIAA] cannot identify individuals," he says in response to a question on false positives. "We want to know how many dolphins the RIAA is catching," referring to a former RIAA spokesperson's 2003 comment about accidentally catching a few dolphins when fishing with a net.