Big-Time File Swappers Still at Large

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34980-2003Aug23.html



By Leslie Walker

The Washington Post

Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page F07




Evidence is popping up that the record industry has millions of Internet music pirates on the run — but not the heavy-duty song swappers the industry has vowed to prosecute.



The NPD Group market-research firm released data last week showing that the number of American households acquiring music files on the Internet dropped 28 percent over three months, from 14.5 million in April to 10.4 million in June. The total number of music files acquired online each month declined less, by 23 percent, from 852 million files in April to 655 million files in June.



That’s because the average number of files each household downloaded actually increased by 6.7 percent during the same period, from 59 files in April to 63 in June, NPD found.



Russ Crupnick, NPD vice president, said in a statement that the Recording Industry Association of America’s legal campaign against file swappers is only scaring “light downloaders” rather than the big fish the RIAA says it wants to catch.



NPD measures both free song swapping at Web sites such as Kazaa and the legal purchase of music online through services such as Apple’s iTunes, relying on software that monitors the computing activity of 40,000 volunteers. The firm didn’t specify how many files were legally purchased instead of illegally copied, but free file sharing vastly outpaces legal music purchases online.



Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) continued pressing the RIAA to provide Congress with details of the subpoenas it has issued to Internet service providers in preparation for suing people who offer songs online. The RIAA sent Coleman a letter saying it wasn’t preparing lawsuits against casual file sharers, only those “illegally distributing a substantial amount of copyrighted music.”



Also last week, the Justice Department announced it had accepted a guilty plea in a copyright case from a 21-year-old who allegedly helped coordinate the distribution of albums online before they had even reached record stores. And a California woman whose identity has been subpoenaed by the RIAA for swapping songs through Kazaa filed a legal motion in federal court in Washington, claiming the RIAA was violating her legal rights.

Related Posts

1. RIAA to file swappers: Let’s chat
2. Long-Time File-Swappers Buy More Music, Not Less
3. RIAA Methods Under Scrutiny
4. RIAA Files Suit Against 762 More File-Swappers
5. Number of music file-swappers falls, study says