music_news 91 posts

IFPI and top music executives have raised the issue of the music industry crisis in Germany during a meeting with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week.

Since 2000 the German music market has shrunk 50%. According to IFPI’s press release the rescue measures proposed to the Chancellor include:
- Introduce an obligation on ISPs to terminate service to subscribers abusing the service to make infringing content available;
- Permit CD burning only from own legally purchased original and prohibiting copying by third parties;
- Improve the German draft law implementing the EU Enforcement Directive to ensure proper tools to fight piracy;
- Ensure that the EU plays an active role in the WTO case against China on Intellectual Property enforcement and market access
- Urge the Czech government to clean up the huge pirate markets on the Czech-German border;
- Support an improvement in... read more

As Christmas holiday season is the most important time for music sales RIAA along with MPAA have launched a Holiday Blitz campaign aimed at “protecting holiday shoppers from purchasing illegal copies of their favorite movies and music and defending movie studios and the recording industry against the loss of crucial holiday sales, especially those from newly released — or even not-yet released — titles”. (www.riaa.com/news)

Significant attention will be devoted to peering as RIAA has much experience in dealing with file-sharers.

At the same time in Europe, German government announced that the fine for illegal music downloads should be limited to maximum of 50 euros (provided the downloading was... read more

Despite thousands of lawsuits filed by IFPI against users of BitTorrent, eDonkey, DirectConnect, Gnutella, Limewire, etc. peering is thriving in Europe. Here are the numbers: “P2P traffic uses a share of 30% (daytime) and 70% (nighttime) of the overall Internet traffic in Germany. The absolute data volume has risen by 10% between June and October 2006. BitTorrent has surpassed eDonkey as the most popular file sharing network and causes more than half of all P2P traffic in Germany. Both networks generate over 95% of the P2P traffic and have nearly displaced previously popular networks such as Kazaa's FastTrack.” (from a survey by Ipoque). As to what is shared, for example, for BitTorrent the figures are: Music 22%, Video (movies) 21%, Video (porn) 15%.

More here:

New Ipoque Survey Confirms the Continuing Boom of P2P File... read more