UK record industry in illegal file-sharing crackdown

Illegal music downloads are being fuelled by file-sharing applications that allow people to share tunes online, the UK record industry has warned.

More people than ever are able to illegally swap their music collections because BitTorrent clients are now so easy to use, said Jollyon Benn, internet investigations executive for the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Ltd.

Benn said that increasing numbers of people are sharing music over clients such as LimeWire in the false belief they are not breaking the law.

He said: "The latest version of LimeWire includes a BitTorrent client in it and the user interface has got much more friendly. It is opening it up to a lot of people, it all comes down to how easy it is to do these things.

"We talk to a lot of people who say 'We thought that it was legal…because we got the premium version of LimeWire'. It is one of our challenges to make people understand the implications of what they are doing."

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The BPI is working with the international recording industry body the IFPI to develop bots and agents that are able to sniff out networks illegally sharing music online.

He said the BPI is concentrating on taking down larger networks sharing hundreds of thousands of tracks rather than individuals with a couple of hundred songs.

But Benn acknowledged there is a dramatic shift among major labels away from digital rights management (DRM) that restricts how people can listen to their music towards alternatives such as unprotected music bearing a digital watermark.

Multi-national label EMI sells tracks DRM-free through Apple's iTunes catalogue while Warner, Sony/BMG and Universal offer unprotected songs on Amazon's US site.

Benn said: "We have now got to a stage where people are replacing those first-generation MP3 players and if they are unable to listen to their recordings because they are bound to a particular DRM they are going to get pretty fed-up."