Coming Down On The Loaders

On 30th March of this year, a music industry board meeting got underway at IRMA’s offices in Dun Laoghaire. Among those present were IRMA Chairman Dick Doyle [pictured], major and indie label MDs, and a cluster of selected industry figureheads. Yet this was no other day at the office; it was a board meeting that would irreversibly alter the way in which people use computers to store, listen to – and crucially to share – music. The times, as they say, were a changin’.

The meeting was a culmination of two years' work on the part of the IRMA executive.
“I’ve spent a huge amount of money in media,” Doyle says now. “18 months ago we sent brochures to 800 companies. We sent brochures to every governmental department. We sent one to every third level educational institute in the country. They all came back to me with what firewalls they have, and showed us what they’re doing to make sure their students or lecturers aren’t involved in it. They gave me evidence to show that under their Codes of Conduct, students will be taken off Internet access, fined or suspended.
“In the last three months, we’ve sent 6 million instant messages,” he continues. “When someone is filesharing, a pop-up message comes up and says, ‘This is IRMA - what you’re doing is illegal’. Effectively, we ran a national and local radio advert campaign, the message of which was don’t steal from musicians, they’re the ones that make the music.”
Having masterminded an extensive media campaign in the previous months, Dick Doyle was certainly seeing results – instances of illegal music downloading began to drop. Further afield, however, Doyle was witnessing the fallout of legal action levelled against individual filesharers.
“12,000 cases have now been taken worldwide at this stage,” he explains. “Overall, the amount of music files on filesharing networks has dropped from 1.1bn to 870m. That’s a drop of 21%. That's amazing, given that in the last two years boadband penetration is up 75%. The number of concurrent users on Kazaaa has gone from 4.2m to 2.3m, a 45% drop.”
Buoyed by these statistics, IRMA began similar proceedings here in Ireland six weeks ago. In order to identify music uploaders, Doyle spent a number of months infiltrating filesharing communities online. With the co-operation of an unnamed ‘specialist’ company, 4,000 seed songs were planted in various filesharing outlets (among them, Doyle recalls, tracks by Keane, Radiohead, Eminem and ABBA).
“In simple terms, people on file-sharing networks are saying to you and me, ‘Come share with me’,” he says. "I accepted their invitation and went in and shared. They gave us an invitation, which we accepted.
“We used the same file-sharing software that they’re on," he adds. "We’re in there, we’re sharing, we have screen shots of what they’re sharing. We have all the evidential info built up to prosecute. The evidential info is nearly a foot high in documents.” Evidence in hand, the question was, what next?

Having presented the evidence to his board of directors two months ago, the possibility of instigating legal action against serial filesharers was raised.
“This seems to be the only message that works, suing people,” Doyle told the board. “The only thing that will work is if we make examples of people. It’s a horrible day, but we have to do it.”
Says Doyle afterwards of the event: “It was like, ‘Okay lads, are we going to sue or not?’ They could have pulled the plug on me and said, ‘No, we’ll not do it’. There was a lot of discussion about it. But they finally were convinced."
When IRMA’s board of directors approved the action last Wednesday (April 6th), the announcement was made that IRMA is seeking damages and injunctions against 17 individuals, who have illegally uploaded hundreds or thousands of music tracks onto peer-to-peer filesharing networks. The announcement was not only welcomed by a number of industry bodies, but also an array of legitimate online music stores, including iStore, Vitaminic and MyCokemusic.
“I always foolishly believed that we wouldn’t get to that stage in Ireland,” admits Doyle. “But the scale of damage was so severe. The market is down 19% in the last 3 years, gone from e146m to e118m. You can’t attribute all of that decline to uploading and downloading, but you can attribute quite a bit of it. But believe me, we never wanted to get to the day where we started suing people. My labels want to be making music and breaking artists and selling records. They don’t want to be involved in litigation.”
IRMA currently has only the usernames and IP addresses of the 17 serial filesharers – and inevitably they have had trouble getting their identities from the Internet Service Providers, Eircom and BT Ireland, because of the Data Protection Act. For now, Doyle remains tight-lipped about IRMA plan of action. However hotpress has learned that it is the associations intention to ask the High Court to instruct the service providers to reveal the identities behind the usernames. The working assumption is that, once copyright infringement is proved by IRMA, a high court judge will compel ISPs to hand over names and addresses of the filesharers.

In the aftermath of the announcement, made on Tuesday 12th April, public reaction was mixed, to say the least, although the anticipated consumer backlash never fully materialised.
“We don’t just have industry support, we also have the support of the artists,” claims Doyle. “RAAP (Recorded Artist and Performers Ltd). were up on the stage with me (when IRMA made the announcement), and IMRO and MCPS support the action. Nobody wanted it to happen, but when it did they were behind it. I have had a number of artists ready to come out in the case of court action, and they’ll support it verbally.
"I was prepared for consumer backlash," he adds. "The office has had just 18 phone calls. Two were vindictive. 16 were from people who were doing it who wanted to clean their PCs and asked if they could plead guilty and get out of it, or from parents who were concerned about their children downloading.”
When contacted by IRMA, the 17 targeted individuals will be faced with two options.
“Option one is that they will be snowed under by evidence, and I will ask them to settle straightaway. This will include getting rid of illegal files, cleaning up their PCs, getting rid of filesharing software. They will also, under court order, be asked to pay damages.
“In the UK, in 26 actions taken four months ago, 25 took option 1 and paid £3,000 damages. I would presume that anyone with common sense would do that. The second option is to go all the way. In that case, they’ll also end up paying my legal fees and theirs. I’m prepared to do it. We’re now ready to walk into the High Court with all this evidence."
Why target individuals, as opposed to the providers of the software?
“The actual software isn’t illegal,” responds Doyle. “On the other hand, using the software is. This is being challenged in the US Supreme Court, and there will be a decision on this in June. “But 75% of all illegal files are uploaded by 15% of people. It’s the distribution chain we’re after, not necessarily the user. Think of the drug industry: the uploader is the distributor and the downloader is the user.”
And what does he say to people who will simply move from KaZaA and Gnutella to a more obscure filesharing outlet?
“It doesn’t matter,” he stresses. “On this particular wave, we’ve hit KaZaA and Gnutella, on the next we’ll hit Limewire and all the rest. We’re very sophisticated on the net. I have a full time anti-piracy person here. We have a scanner that scans the net constantly, and everything happening in Ireland gets thrown back to us, whether it’s a website or fileshare. We have wonderful relations with the Internet Service Providers; when we find websites with illegal music on them, they’re taken down from the Net within an hour or two.”
To those who have been critical of IRMA’s efforts to eradicate illegal downloading, Doyle counters by pointing out the knock-on effects on the emergence of new talent.
“Up to the year 1999, between 20% and 30% of industry turnover was being invested in A&R,” he explains. “Effectively, that has collapsed in the last 3 years. The market is down 25% worldwide, and six billion Euro has been wiped off turnover. Whatever chance you had as an artist of breaking in the late ‘90s, you have a far slimmer chance today.
"People say it’s a great medium for breaking acts, but that’s only true if the act’s name is already known. We could have lost 5-7 years of brilliant talent that would never be heard because of the illegal use of software.”
Needless to say, IRMA are fully approving of downloading…via the established online music stores like iStore and My Cokemusic.
"These sites have heralded a big change, but they’re still in their infancy,” he admits. “The way I see it, people should be entitled to download music but not illegally. It’s 99c a song, which is half the price of a cup of coffee. Of course the consumers are entitled to choice; they can say, ‘I only like two songs of the album’. Well, then, go buy the two songs. And more importantly, enjoy them.”