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| File-Sharing Operators Hit With Big Fines, Jail Sentences Posted: 21 Jan 2011 01:03 AM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! .
The hub, which in very basic terms operated a little like a BitTorrent tracker, directing traffic between other members of the network, was known as Sarah’s Secret Chamber. It had around 1,600 users and most of them were sharing large amounts of copyrighted material. In normal circumstances, most members of this type of network will bring some of their own content to the party, pooling resources so that the hub has a library of material. Very often bringing large amount of content is a requirement for membership. Sarah’s Secret Chamber had a fairly large capacity – around 50 terabytes. For the purposes of a trial the IFPI converted 50TB to “750,000 illegal albums” and to compensate for this ill-gotten booty, copyright holders demanded some $2.7 million in compensation. Yesterday, in a district court in Tammisaari west of the capital Helsinki, two of the site’s admins were sentenced. Rejecting their claims that the hub was set up for the purposes of discussion, the court ruled that the pair would have been fully aware of what was happening with their users and that copyright violations were taking place. The 35 year-old woman and a 21 year-old man received suspended jail sentences of four and three months respectively. The court ordered the pair to pay compensation to rightsholders of 800,000 euros ($1.08 million), the bulk of it going to the IFPI. “It is a shame to see how a private organization has the power to chase after people and can not even show any significant loss of income or any other harm to anyone,” said Finnish Pirate Party chairman Pasi Palmulehto in a statement. “Even real crimes do not normally result in such large sums of compensation.” The fine even exceeds that handed down to seven operators of the Finnish BitTorrent site Finreactor. Last year they were ordered to pay a total of 680,000 euros in damages to copyright holders. |
| Piracy Horrors and The Music Industry’s Twisted Reality Posted: 20 Jan 2011 01:07 PM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! .
Unfortunately it’s gotten to a point where we choose to ignore most updates. Not because we don’t want to voice the concerns of the music industry, but simply because there’s rarely anything new to report. We’re hearing the same tired set of complaints year after year and every bit of progress is framed as being insignificant compared to the rampant piracy underway. In this year’s Digital Music Report published by IFPI, the position is no different. “The overall impact of digital piracy has been to contribute substantially to the dramatic erosion in industry revenues in recent years. Despite the surge by more than 1000 per cent in the digital music market from 2004 to 2010 to an estimated value of US$4.6 billion, global recorded music revenues declined by 31 per cent over the same period,” we read. “The two figures powerfully illustrate how, in the face of piracy, even the most progressive strategy of licensing hundreds of digital music services has been unable to prevent the steady decline in the overall legitimate music market and that decline will continue unless action is taken,” IFPI adds. The industry representatives conveniently ignore the massive format shift that’s happening, and simply blame piracy for the fact that overall revenue is down. We’ve pointed out before that this scapegoating is unjust, but the music labels stick to their mantra and even ‘dare’ to quote one of the worst pieces of BitTorrent research ever to make their case. Hoping to convince governments to implement harsh anti-piracy laws, the report lists several studies that show how ‘illegal’ file-sharing services are killing the music business. Among the studies cited is the one one conducted by the University of Ballarat's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory. Yes, these are the researchers that managed to make extremely inaccurate claims about the BitTorrent landscape, not once, but twice. The part that’s quoted by IFPI claims that 89% of all torrents “from a sample” link to copyrighted material, but as we pointed out before this sample is not really representative of the content that’s available on BitTorrent. Of course we’re not going to argue here what the accurate percentage should be, it may be much lower, or even higher. But the sad part is that IFPI is once again cherry-picking studies in an effort to influence the opinions of politicians while ignoring all studies and statistics that show opposite effects. Those who take the time to read it will notice that the entire Digital Music Report is one big rant against piracy, and a twisted one at that. For example, aside from citing doubtful studies, IFPI claims that album sales of starting artists fell 77% between 2003 and 2010 due to piracy. That’s pretty bad, right? What they leave out is that all album sales fell dramatically, and that the sale of singles increased by more than 1000% in the same time. The latter is a quite spectacular figure, but also one that’s totally ignored in the report. Perhaps there’s an alternative explanation? The sad part is that even with stricter anti-piracy laws there’s probably not going to be much change. We’ve seen this in France where Hadopi was introduced last year and we’ll probably see this in other countries as well. Piracy will always exist, the trick is to make it obsolete. And this can be done to a certain extent. Take the European music streaming application Spotify for example. They’ve signed up 750,000 users in the first year and have already become the second largest source of digital revenue for the record labels in Europe. Also, note that these people don’t have to pirate anything, but they don’t have to buy any albums or singles either. Indeed, why doesn’t the report mention Spotify as a reason that album sales are down? The only way the music industry can save itself is when it acknowledges that music consumption is drastically changing, and that it has to seize opportunities instead of focusing on a threat that exists mostly in their imagination. |
Following a music industry investigation, in June 2007 police in Finland carried out house raids against the operators of a Direct Connect hub.
The majority of the reports and press releases put out by the music industry in the past several years can be summarized in a few words: “Piracy is evil and we lose a lot of money because of it.” | You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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