The biggest wave of legal actions against Internet music file-sharers was announced yesterday, with new cases launched against 963 individuals in 11 countries across Europe and Asia.
The actions extend the policy of suing alleged illegal file-sharers to four new countries in Europe - Netherlands, Finland, Ireland and Iceland. They join Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the UK, who all began litigation in the last year.
The first Asian country to take legal action, Japan, has also announced that it is joining the battle against online music piracy. The Japanese market has been hit hard by Internet piracy and other factors in recent years losing 30% of its value (200 billion yen or $1.8 billion) between 2000 and 2004.
The new wave of lawsuits, coordinated by IFPI on behalf of its more than 1,450 member record companies, affects users not just of the KaZaA/eDonkey/eMule networks, but also those on newer file-sharing services including various Gnutella services and BitTorrent.
Those who are paying the price of piracy include a German judge, a French cook and a British local councilor. They have all uploaded top chart hits, in numbers ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands.
9,900 cases have been brought to date in the US. This brings the total number of lawsuits to have been launched internationally to 11,552.
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