On November 15th, IRMA – The trade association of the Irish music industry initiated the second phase of its legal action against serial uploaders of copyright music for illegal sharing. The first legal class action which was taken in April was deemed a short term success. In the immediate timeframe after the action, according to IRMA’s director general Dick Doyle, ‘the number of illegal uploads had halved’. However, by July, August and September, the number was back up to its original high. It seems that the first legal action had sent a shock to the uploaders locally, only to drive them underground for a short period and for them to raise up again when they felt the coast was truly clear.
It is now clear that continuous legal action is necessary for IRMA if it is to reduce the number of illegal file shares through peer to peer networks. It just a pity that its education process and media campaign wasn’t enough to reduce the piracy. While IRMA may have been presented by some as a guard dog of the big bad record companies coming down on the innocent consumer, it is clear that the organisation is within its right to protect the copyright material of the companies it represents and to reaffirm to the general public that the sharing of the copyright material over P2P is illegal and is the equivalent of stealing.
So much is IRMA in the right, that in the first phase of legal action, Irish internet service providers were compelled by the High Court to disclose the identities of those most serious of file uploading offenders of that they could be pursued for compensation.
50 cases will be pursued by IRMA in the second phase and it will go after 50 serial uploaders who were subscribers to the internet services of Eircom Net, Esat BT, Irish Broadband and Chorus to upload the music. Once more IRMA will require high court orders to get the identities of the offending uploaders.
To give you an idea of the extent of the illegal sharing, Doyle claims that over 50,800 songs were uploaded by the 50 users in question. One user uploaded 5,000 songs.
The traditional defence for illegal file sharing though P2P services was that there was no legal digital alternative. This is certainly no longer the case with Itunes and Sony among others offering legal digital download services in Ireland. Doyle himself says that IRMA ‘would never go to court without legitimate digital download services being in place.’
The central point here is that it is uploaders that the recording industry is chasing as they are distributing content for which they have licence to do. Downloaders are less at risk, home users may still rip their music to their portable music players, and download tracks from legitimate sites, more of which are coming on stream all of the time.
In the end persistent litigation complemented by increasing legitimate digital distribution seems to be the only successful strategy for the music industry to pursue internet pirates. The serial uploaders are getting the message and if they aren’t, their parents of the teenage ones certainly are with fines of up to EUR*2,500 in the offing.
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