 Tech week in review |
As last week wore to a close, it was difficult to tell the April Fools’ jokes from the actual news.
File swappers across Canada found some shelter from the Net’s copyright storm, but the ruling by a Canadian federal court judge declaring the download of mp3s for personal use as a legal activity was far from welcome news in other parts of the world.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a worldwide recording industry association based in London, announced an initial round of 247 suits against alleged file sharers. The IFPI said it plans to bring additional lawsuits in other countries over the coming months, after filing criminal complaints in Italy and Germany, and civil litigation in Denmark and Canada.
Meanwhile, the Recording Industry Association of America continued to pile on lawsuits against our neighbours to the south, filing new litigation against another 532 anonymous individuals just last week.
Interestingly, as published earlier on VanRamblings, a study of file sharing’s effects on music sales says online music trading appears to have played little part in the recent slide of CD sales. According to the report, by researchers at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, even high levels of file swapping seemed to translate into an effect on album sales that was “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” they wrote. “We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales. While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing.”
