Soundbites From IFPI's CEO, A Songwriter And An International Legal Expert

JAY BERMAN, chairman of IFPI, representing the International Recording Industry:

"Internet piracy is probably the greatest danger faced by the music industry today.

"There are somewhere between 800 and 900 million illegal files being shared by millions of people. This illegal sharing has a tremendous negative consequence for everyone in the music chain.

"Everybody across the whole music chain has suffered as a result of internet piracy.

"Illegal file-sharing is not a grey area, it is black and white. Everywhere it's illegal.

"I honestly do believe once people who are engaged in illegal activity have a clearer understanding that there are legal consequences, that they're not anonymous, that what they do can be determined and once it is determined who they are, there are consequences, that the amount of activity will decrease. And as that illegal activity decreases I honestly do believe that the level of legitimate activity will increase.

"IFPI, and its National Groups around the world, have taken pains over the course of the last year to send a message out to universities, to corporations that this kind of activity is illegal, that you need to look at your own IT operations to ensure that you are not hosting illegal activities.

"One of the elements of the campaign is in fact to take legal actions against large-scale uploaders - people who are taking our music and making it available to the rest of the world. That's one element in a worldwide industry response - a kind of fight back to unauthorised p2p file-sharing.

"Even more than the people in the music chain, the greatest beneficiary will be the music consumer. They will have access to the music that they want. They will have it in a quality way with reliability.

"If you believe in music, if you want to listen to music and you want the music to keep coming then you will understand and appreciate why it's so important for us to fight back."

CHRIS BLACKWELL, musician, drummer, composer and Grammy nominee:

"It's bit alarming to do a search on the internet for your own name and find sites coming up with tracks you have written for free download.

"You've got to rent the studio, which is a fortune, then you've got the engineers in the studio, you've got tape op in the studio who's there usually 24 hours a day and sleeps on the couch, you've got the tea boy. When it gets out of the studio you've got to pay for the video, you've got the directors on the shoot, you've got the runners on the shoot, you've got the CD pressing, the graphic art designer who does the artwork for the CD. All of that stuff is involved, not just the musician that's affected, it goes all the way down the chain to the guy who comes in and says 'how many sugars do you want?' - and that's the problem.

"If you've written something and you think well I'm going to bung it on the internet and people can download it, that's great, that's what you decided, that was your decision to actually do that.

"And in, I would say, 99% of cases that's what's happening: people are just taking stuff that doesn't belong to them, uploading it and then allowing anybody else to download it for free without asking the consent of the guy who wrote it in the first place - and that's a huge problem.

"There are legal sites out there on the internet where you can download individual tracks and pay for them on a track by track basis or you can buy the whole album. The benefits of that are many but the main one, perhaps, for people that are downloading stuff is that you are guaranteed the quality's going to be good.

"Music isn't free. If you pay for it you are helping sustain music, you are not killing it, you're actually allowing it to develop and grow. So if you want music to get interesting again, buy it."

PROFESSOR ALAIN STROWEL, copyright lawyer:

"Copyright is not obsolete in the digital age. It remains an essential tool to protect creation and it also ensures that everybody, creators, and other people involved in the creative process get a fair share of the work's success.

"The privacy laws are fundamental rights throughout the EU but these rights are not without limitations and you cannot invoke your right to privacy, hide behind it, when you are violating other laws.

"Internet users are not anonymous. When you engage in activities such as uploading music in large amounts, you are visible."