Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

Out-Law News 1 min. read

ISPs ordered to disclose UK file-sharers' identities


The High Court yesterday ordered five ISP s to reveal the identities of 33 file-swappers sued by the British Phonographic Industry ( BPI ), bringing to 90 the total number of individuals so far targeted by the UK music industry in its crackdown against file-sharing.
The British music industry is targeting major "uploaders" – those charged with putting hundreds of copyrighted songs on to internet file-sharing networks and offering them to, potentially, millions of people worldwide without permission from the copyright owners.The individuals targeted by this round of lawsuits had uploaded more than 72,000 music files to the internet, according to the BPI.But the industry does not yet know who the file-swappers are – it only knows their ISPs – and last week it applied to the High Court in London for Orders of Disclosure. These have now been granted.The ISPs have 14 days to provide the BPI with the names and addresses of the individuals. The trade group is then likely to contact the file-sharers with a view to settling the actions, but will go to court if necessary, claiming compensation and a reimbursement of the legal costs involved."This court order should remind every user of a peer-to-peer file-sharing service in Britain that they are not anonymous," said BPI General Counsel Geoff Taylor. "These 33 people will now face paying thousands of pounds in compensation.""We are continuing to collect evidence every day against people who are still uploading music illegally, despite all the warnings we have given. If you want to avoid the risk of court action, stop file-sharing and buy music legally," he added.The BPI also highlighted the risk to parents if they did not keep an eye on what their children were downloading from the internet.Providing further details of the 31 people targeted in its last round of legal cases, filed in March, the BPI revealed that around a third of those individuals were thought to be parents whose accounts were used by their children to upload music illegally.

"The risks of allowing children unsupervised access to the internet are well-known," warned Taylor. "To that long list should now be added the very real possibility of legal action if music is uploaded to the internet illegally. The safest thing that parents can do is check their computer regularly and disable any file-sharing software. If children want to buy music on-line, there are plenty of legal music stores that are safe to use".

We are processing your request. \n Thank you for your patience. An error occurred. This could be due to inactivity on the page - please try again.