Law Weblog

File sharing may not be illegal

Sunday 17 January 2010 at 3:12 pm | In News | Post Comment The first, and may be the last trial for file sharing ended in acquittal this week. Prosecutors were unable to establish when downloading music breaks the law. They may never be able to, even with proposed new legislation.

Alan Ellis, 26, ran Oink, one of the world’s largest music sharing websites, but Teesside Crown Court cleared him of conspiracy to defraud. Ellis received £11,000 a month in donations from people using the site.  Oink had almost 200,000 members and facilitated the download of 21m music files between 2004 and 2007.  Mr Ellis, a software engineer told the court he had no intention to defraud copyright holders, and he had developed the site to brush up on his computer skills.  The prosecution was unable to show that Mr Ellis knew he was infringing copyright.

Prosecuting individuals who have downloaded just a few music files is costly and generates a lot of negative publicity for music companies.  To prosecute successfully people who run file-sharing sites is all but impossible because there is no copyright violation; they do not hold any of the music files themselves, just the software.

Under the Digital Economy bill, internet service providers could be required to cut off web access from customers downloading large amounts of material illegally in the unlikely event that they were able to prove illegal downloading.