FREELOADERS
Good news: download music, films and DVDs for nothing Bad news: it's illegal and you could well get prosecuted
By Shiraz Lalani
YOU'RE a Bruce Springsteen fan. You download a simple piece of software to your PC, set it running and type in Bruce's name.
Instantly available to you - and absolutely free - is every song he's ever recorded, video footage from concerts, bootleg recordings of live shows and even radio interviews.
This is file-swapping.
Pick what you want, double-click the link, and you can download hours of music to your computer in a few minutes, ready to burn on to a CD or transfer to a digital music player such as an iPod.
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It's an immense swap shop that opens up the world's biggest music library to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
It's also illegal - and most of the music industry detests it.
Anything ever recorded, from Crazy Frog to Beethoven, is available. And it's not just music - entire movies and the hottest TV shows such as 24 and The OC are there too.
The record companies and Hollywood studios claim file-swapping will kill the entertainment industry, with people downloading for free instead of buying CDs and DVDs.
In its simplest form, you make your music collection available to others to search while you search theirs for any music you don't have.
With 100 million people swapping files, and more than 10 million actually doing it on-line at any one time, the possibilities are endless.
You put, say, 100 tracks from your own CD collection in your Shared folder - and it opens the door to millions of tracks on millions of other computers around the world.
But at the same time, you make yourself susceptible to hackers and viruses. Hundreds of Americans had their tax returns hacked after they used their computers to share music.
But now the record business is hitting back. In America, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have taken up the fight against the pirates.
And in this country, the British Phonographic Industry, which represents thousands of record labels from EMI to tiny independents, has issued demands for up to £4,000 to British file-swappers for breach of copyright.
Mum Sylvia Price, 53, who has never even used a computer, was hit with a £2,500 bill from the BPI over some 1,400 songs her 14-year-old daughter Emily downloaded.
Sylvia, from Cheltenham, Glos, says she had no idea Emily was using her PC to scour file-swapping sites for songs by Oasis and Coldplay while she should have been doing her homework.
But the BPI says internet piracy costs record companies £1.3billion a year in lost sales, and they have no choice but to take a stand.
Communications director Steve Redmond said: "We certainly didn't rush into this. We are reluctant litigators. No one got into the record business because they wanted to sue consumers.
"The fact is, if you didn't have speed cameras, people would speed. If you didn't have store detectives, goods would walk out the door.
"And unfortunately if we don't demonstrate that copyright law has teeth, we're going to be out of business."
Musicians have backed the BPI stance. Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey was keen to dispel the myth that all musicians are millionaires.
He said: "It's extraordinary! Sixty per cent of musicians in the UK earn less than £10,000 a year, yet we are prepared to ask them to work every day and not get paid for it."
And Mark Knopfler, of Dire Straits, said: "You might as well walk into a record store, put the CDs in your pocket and walk out without paying."
Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records, said: "I am always amazed by people who profess to love music yet pay their council tax to politicians they don't like, pay their bank charges to bankers they despise, but steal from the musicians who are supposedly the great loves of their lives."
But there are plenty who don't believe that filesharing does any harm at all to the record industry.
Researchers at Harvard and the University of North Carolina found that it can actually boost legitimate music sales.
Their research revealed that for top-selling albums, every 150 downloads increased sales by one copy.
Another survey by analysts Entertainment Media Research found that internet pirates bought 21 per cent more CDs than other internet users who didn't download music illegally.
And the most recent sales figures - from the BPI itself - appear to support this view.
Last year the British CD albums market grew by 4.5 per cent, with sales hitting a record 174.6million.
And early illegal download sites paved the way for legitimate online services such as iTunes and Napster.
Last year 5.7million tracks were downloaded legally - ie paid for - in Britain, a more than five-fold increase on 2003.
Worldwide, legal downloads went from 20million tracks to 200million.
The booming market in ringtones and mobile phone music downloads is also pouring money back into the music industry to the tune of £2.5billion a year by 2008 - 12 per cent of total music sales.
The industry hopes, however, that its high profile action against the file-swappers will divert pirates into legitimate services, where tracks cost around 79p. When 12-year-old Brianna LaHara from New York was sued for downloading 1,000 songs and nursery rhymes, the high-profile case sparked a 30 per cent fall in illegal downloads in America.
Meanwhile, the online piracy battle has moved on to movies.
The rise in broadband net connections - which allow much larger files to be swapped over the net - means film fans can now download DVD quality feature-length blockbusters in a couple of hours.
Within hours of the latest Star Wars movie opening in America, tens of thousands of people in the UK had downloaded a pirate copy to their computer.
And the second series of Desperate Housewives is freely available to download - illegally of course - months before it is due to be shown in Britain.
The challenge now facing Hollywood is to follow the lead of the music industry, to beat the pirates and harness the net to provide paid-for movie download services.
Then the Saturday night trip to the video shop to rent a DVD could be replaced by downloading a film from the movie equivalent of Napster or iTunes.