[Tech] Primo P2P crackdown in Europa

La IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), la sigla che raggruppa a livello mondiale le organizzazioni dei discografici (dall'americana RIAA all'italiana FIMI) ha lanciato una "prima ondata" (parole loro) di azioni legali contro 247 file-sharer europei (fra cui 30 italiani) che scambiavano o downloadavano illegalmente musica su network come Kazaa, DirectConnect, WinMX, eMule and iMesh.

IFPI and the recording industry associations in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Canada today announced the first wave of international lawsuits charging individuals with illegally file-sharing copyrighted music.



A total of 247 alleged illegal file-sharers face legal action in a move that steps up the industry's international campaign against online copyright theft. Further waves of lawsuits against major offenders will be launched in different countries in the coming months.



The legal actions, following similar successful actions in United States, charge the individuals with illegally making available hundreds of music tracks for copying, transmission and distribution via file-sharing services.



IFPI, representing the recording industry worldwide, made it clear that the legal actions come only after a sustained educational effort by the music industry and as record companies are making available the bulk of their music for downloading legally.

La cosa interessante è che, praticamente in contemporanea con questo primo attacco frontale ai "pirati" (sic) europei, uno studio pubblicato da due ricercatori universitari smentisce la tesi secondo cui il P2P danneggia gravemente le case discografiche, anzi:

Internet music piracy has no negative effect on legitimate music sales, according to a study released today by two university researchers that contradicts the music industry's assertion that the illegal downloading of music online is taking a big bite out of its bottom line.



Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy, the researchers found.



"Consumption of music increases dramatically with the introduction of file sharing, but not everybody who likes to listen to music was a music customer before, so it's very important to separate the two," said Felix Oberholzer-Gee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and one of the authors of the study.



Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina's Koleman Strumpf, also said that their "most pessimistic" statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.



"From a statistical point of view, what this means is that there is no effect between downloading and sales," said Oberholzer-Gee.

Fonte: ZDNet.