Music industry scores victory as piracy swells |

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Music industry scores victory as piracy swells

5. August 2006, 14:54 Uhradmin

Forty songs are being downloaded illegally for every legal music download, according to estimates produced on Thursday as the record industry scored one of its biggest victories against online piracy.

Some 20bn songs were downloaded illegally last year, compared with a legal digital market of about 500m tracks, the IFPI, the international music industry lobby group, said.

The estimate was disclosed as the IFPI and its US counterpart, the RIAA, confirmed a settlement with Sharman Networks, which distributes the Kazaa peer-to-peer software applications that are thought to account for up to 15 per cent of music file-sharing.

Under the terms of the deal, Sharman will pay Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music more than $100m (€79m, £54m), the biggest settlement fine by far in any music piracy lawsuit. The music companies will also receive 20 per cent of future income from Kazaa after it agreed to adapt to a legal model.

“Kazaa was an international engine of copyright theft which damaged the whole music sector,” said John Kennedy, the chairman and chief executive of IFPI. “This brings the biggest piracy brand in the world into a legal model.”

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A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network relies primarily on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers. P2P networks are typically used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections. Such networks are useful for many purposes. Sharing content files (see file sharing) containing audio, video, data or anything in digital format is very common, and realtime data, such as telephony traffic, is also passed using P2P technology.A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example for a non peer-to-peer file transfer is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct, and the clients initiate the download.