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
ISP
s 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".
