The music industry on Tuesday launched the first wave of international lawsuits against Web pirates as it warned that global record sales fell an estimated 7 percent last year.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said legal actions had been brought against habitual users of illegal Internet services in Italy, Germany, Denmark and Canada. Jay Berman, the chairman of the global music industry body, said similar lawsuits were "likely" in the UK if consumers failed to respond to repeated warnings from the British Phonographic Industry body.
The latest round of lawsuits follows similar action against more than 2,000 consumers in the US over the past year.
Criminal and civil proceedings have been brought against 247 Internet users who break copyright laws by making hundreds, and in one case 54,000, files available over the Web for fans to download.
Berman said he expected the legal proceedings to have an impact on the number of illegal music files distributed over the Internet without the consent of record companies and their artists.
An estimated 800,000 illegal files are available on the Internet, downloaded from services such as Kazaa, DirectConnect and iMesh.
"The number of illegal files being made available will shrink dramatically, because everything now known about the mechanics of these services is that a relatively small number of people are making a relatively large number of files available," he said.
The destructive effect of Web piracy on the record industry was underlined on Tuesday by IFPI estimates that global record sales shrank a further 7 percent last year. In 2002, the market dropped 7 percent to US$32bn as services such as Napster took advantage of the rise in broadband access and sparked a surge in use of file-sharing networks.
The seemingly gloomy outlook for past year, however, points to a slowing of the decline in record sales in the second half of last year.
The global music market declined 10.9 percent in the first six months of last year.
Alan Dixon, the general counsel of the IFPI, said the example of lawsuits in the US, where the majority of Web-based piracy is committed, proved that legal action had a deterrent effect. The number of music files on the best known downloading site, Kazaa, has fallen from 900 million in April last year to 550 million.
"We do think there is a deterrent method that lawsuits can bring against the wider population of [illegal music file] users," he said.
Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Jupiter Research, said the IFPI may have made a strategic error in taking high profile action against users when legitimate online services such as Napster and iTunes were months away from launching in Europe.
"The stick is being beaten before the carrot has been grown. The timing of high-profile press releases prior to the wider availability of legitimate services is unfortunate, at best," he said.
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