By Patrick Lannin
The music industry's top lobby group said on Tuesday it was launching new legal action against the sharing of files over the Internet, which it blames for hitting sales.
The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has announced it is launching 2,100 new lawsuits and extending the action to five new countries in Europe, Asia and, for the first time, South America.
It said file-sharers in Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Hong Kong and Singapore and United States will be prosecuted 'for good this time'.
"It's the thinking of dinosaurs for anyone to believe that they can steal music after all the education and campaigns that we have had," IFPI head John Kennedy told Reuters.
The group said it was taking further action against people who put music out on the Internet, uploading, via peer-to-peer software, which allows others to download the files.
The group said actions, which are either civil complaints or criminal prosecutions, launched on Tuesday or brought recently took the total number of legal cases against uploaders to more than 3,800 in 16 nations outside the United States.
The legal action is part of a carrot-and-stick approach in the industry, which is promoting digital music services such as iTunes and Napster while prosecuting illegal file sharers.
Sales of digital music tripled in the first half of 2005, representing
6 percent of the market, or about $790 million.IFPI said actions so far had led to mostly young men between the ages of 20 and 30 paying fines of $3,000 or more. IFPI said "expect larger fines and more guys getting sued in the next few months."
The cases being launched in Sweden, Argentina, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore joined Austria, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States, it said.
IFPI said that in Argentina four out of 10 Internet users had unauthorised p2p services. In Singapore, the recording industry has filed 33 criminal complaints involving users of networks FastTrack and Gnutella, it said.
In Hong Kong, civil actions are being brought against 22 uploaders. In November, a man who uploaded three films on to the BitTorrent network was sentenced to three months jail, it said, adding that "many in the United States will wind up in jail also."
In Sweden, it said the music industry was announcing 15 criminal complaints against music uploaders with more waves to follow. It said research showed that more than 1 million people in the Nordic country are file-sharing illegally.
Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited.
NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at