Now, as I said, note the last section:http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/0 ... index.html
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- The recording industry has taken its piracy fight directly to music fans, suing more than 200 people this week alone. Now comes the hard part: Persuading the very people it has threatened with legal action to revisit music stores or sample legal downloading services.
That might prove difficult, some observers say, because the industry's lawsuit campaign could spark a consumer backlash spurred by the discontent many music fans already feel over soaring CD prices and the shrinking number of retailers offering varied music titles.
"The real hope here is that people will return to the record store," said Eric Garland, CEO of BigCampagne LLC, which tracks peer-to-peer Internet trends. "The biggest question is whether singling out a handful of copyright infringers will invigorate business or drive file-sharing further underground, further out of reach."
Scaring music sharers
Jason Rich, of Watervliet, New York, said the record companies' campaign prompted him to stop downloading music from file-sharing networks, but he called the issue "disconcerting."
"I think it's kind of silly to go after individuals," said Rich, 26. "There are so many Web sites out there, people don't know necessarily they're doing anything wrong."
Some of the music fans caught in the piracy net cast by the recording industry took steps Tuesday toward settling the copyright infringement lawsuits levied against them for sharing song files over the Internet.
Settling suits
The industry sued 261 people on Monday and has promised to sue hundreds more in coming weeks as it strives to stamp out music piracy it blames for a three-year slump in CD sales.
The Recording Industry Association of America settled the first of the suits Tuesday for $2,000 -- with the mother of a 12-year-old defendant, Brianna LaHara of New York. Brianna was accused of downloading more than 1,000 songs using Kazaa.
RIAA Vice President Matt Oppenheim said he was not surprised to see young and old alike caught in the industry's snare.
"We know that there are a lot of young people who are using these services and we totally expected that we would end up targeting them," Oppenheim said. "As we have said from the beginning ... there is no free pass to engage in music piracy just because you haven't come of age. We're not surprised and we're not deterred."
Consumers already think so little of the music companies, that the lawsuits likely won't make much difference, said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research, Inc.
"The industry has been backed into a corner, and their image is so bad, the lawsuits are not going to be much of a problem," he said.
The industry opted to target individuals earlier this year, figuring music fans who prefer to get their music online now are beginning to have viable options to do so legally through for-pay music download services like Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store and Buy.com's BuyMusic.com.
But while iTunes has sold more than 10 million song downloads since its April launch, no service has emerged for the large majority of computer users on the Window platform.
Less file-sharing
There are signs some people have stopped file-sharing since June, when the RIAA announced its lawsuit campaign, and also have moved to other file-swapping networks perceived to be safer than the market leader, Kazaa.
Traffic on the FastTrack network, the conduit for Kazaa and Grokster users, declined over the summer and climbed again last month, as has the number of people using less popular file-sharing software like eDonkey, Garland said.
At the same time, a decline in CD sales worsened. Between June 15 and August 3, the decline in CD sales accelerated 54 percent. And as of August 3, CD sales were down 9.4 percent over the same period in 2002, according to the Yankee Group.
Now, we have two scenarios to account for this:Less file-sharing
There are signs some people have stopped file-sharing since June, when the RIAA announced its lawsuit campaign, and also have moved to other file-swapping networks perceived to be safer than the market leader, Kazaa.
Traffic on the FastTrack network, the conduit for Kazaa and Grokster users, declined over the summer and climbed again last month, as has the number of people using less popular file-sharing software like eDonkey, Garland said.
At the same time, a decline in CD sales worsened. Between June 15 and August 3, the decline in CD sales accelerated 54 percent. And as of August 3, CD sales were down 9.4 percent over the same period in 2002, according to the Yankee Group.
A) People have seen the underhanded tactics of the RIAA against file sharers and have decided to stop buying records, or,
B) People stopped buying records because of a number of reasons, not including file sharing.
[/quote]
