Over at the register(link=http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/04/bpi_fileshare_settlements/) and bbc news(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/4318765.stm) on line an article shows how BPI coerced and/or extorted payments from persons who allowed music to be uploaded and distributed via P2P networks, 23 people paid GBP50,000 to settle out of court with an additional 31 being sought in connection with the same offence. Of the 23 people involved 17 males and 6 females in age from 22 to 58, one included an IT Director.

Yay!
Good thing I stopped downloading music ages ago.
Good old MSN and its crappy DRM.

Ben

The best and only way to stop illegal downloading is to put a reasonable price on cd,s instead of trying to rip off everyone.
In uk the price of a cd is way over the top and even if you download from a legal site it is still over the top compared to other countries..

I think were all safe then

How terrible.

Ouuuuch GBP50,000 would buy a lot of CD’s !!! But than again from the amount of people using P2P, 23 people would be about .0002% it’s like a drop in the ocean. Your chances are a lot better wining Loto than being caught.

Just to be a little clearer, those who settled paid an average of £2,200 each, with the highest settlement being £4,500, likely the one who shared out around 9,000 songs

The £50,000 files is the total of sum of the settlements paid by the 23 who settled.

Ok, this seems about as fair as you can get.

Unlike movies it is now easy to buy music legaly at a fair price online (£6.99 per album).

If thats 69p a song, and they shared 9000 songs, each uploaded again say on adverage 10 times (thats a conservative estamate), then £4500 (max) is 5p per song, still much less than they would have payed legaly, so really its not a fine at all, its just getting them to pay for what they for each song they stole. If you walked into a shop and stole something and they caught you and said "just pay for it 1/10 of it and we will leave you alone" I would think that great. Of course they stole more then they could afford legaly, and I doubt they would have payed for £45,000 worth of music.

Really if they had to pay for it all they would be looking into more like £50,000-75,000 per person.

Ben

You're quite right there and even if the user just downloaded the 9,000 tracks for their self, then if this user was the one who paid the £4,500 settlement, this would work out around 50p a song. On the other hand, if the user were to have downloaded these 9,000 or so tracks legally on iTunes or Napster (assuming by the track) which both charges 79p a track in the UK, the user would have had to fork out over £7,100 anyway.

In my opinion these settlements will affect each type of user very different. For example if an unemployed student had to pay a £2,000 settlement, this would have a much worse affect on this person than another user on a high income job having to pay a £4,500 or higher settlement.

I still think it's appalling. Copyright laws should be completely overhauled to protect artists' interests whilst being still being fair to consumers, as they are now they're just corrupt rules to make corporations money and allow them to bully perfectly decent and otherwise law-abiding people.

attacking the hand that feeds them is the way i see it.