Petteri Pyyny
12 Apr 2005 4:01
Often better-known as the "mother of all RIAAs", the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers, has extended its on-going holy war against the P2P networks to several new countries. Yesterday, IFPI filed total of 963 lawsuits around the world. Countries where lawsuits were filed included Finland, Japan, Ireland, Netherlands and Iceland.
According to the IFPI, the example that RIAA has set in the U.S. by sueing thousands of individuals, seems to work and it is determined to extend that method to the European and Asian countries now and in the future.
According to several IFPI's local operations, including Finnish ÄKT, the lawsuits were targeted to P2P users who were considered as "heavy file uploaders", people who share thousands, maybe tens of thousands of files via P2P networks. It should be remembered that downloading from P2P networks is perfectly legal in most of the European countries. The lawsuits weren't targeted to any particular P2P network, but instead included users of eMule, eDonkey, Kazaa, BitTorrent, DirectConnect, DC++, etc.
The quick breakdown for each targeted country:
More information: IFPI