Will file-swappers be sued in UK? “Hopefully not,” says BPI

Jamieson was making the keynote address at the "In the City" conference on 14th September, when he turned the spotlight on internet piracy and the individuals who perpetrate it.

In the UK, music sales fell 3% in value last year after a five-year growth run, and the industry attributes blame to the unauthorised peer-to-peer services that make songs available to users as free downloads from other users' computers. The industry has begun gearing up to protect itself.

So far, this action has amounted to advertising campaigns to educate the public, and the only legal action has targeted web sites or FTP servers that host unauthorized music files. According to Jamieson, the BPI's Anti-Piracy Unit has taken down 363 of these so far. The BPI has also taken action to remove around 2,500 auction sites together with over 150,000 MP3 files that infringed its members' copyrights. But so far no action has been taken against individual file swappers.

There are several reasons for this. Among them, Jamieson points to Britain's failure to implement the European Copyright Directive. This should have been done by 22nd December last year. Two weeks ago, the Copyright Directorate indicated to OUT-LAW.COM that it would have the final form of the legislation ready to lay before Parliament by the end of this month.

The BPI is concentrating on educating people on the dangers that file-sharing poses to the industry. Jamieson said that if internet piracy continues it "will kill the music they love." But he did not rule out litigation against individuals. "Do we intend to sue?" he asked. "The answer is hopefully not." Jamieson concluded:

"I didn't take this job in order to sue music fans. I don't want to sue music fans. None of my members want to sue music fans. We will do everything we can to avoid suing music fans.
But I will certainly not rule it out, if it is a matter of survival for the business I love, because we need an honest majority to make things work across the board."

The British music industry's approach to internet piracy was addressed in Issue 7 of OUT-LAW Magazine, which includes an interview with Peter Jamieson.