She says she only earns £150 a week and cannot afford the fine.

She is also growing increasingly desperate. After that date, it warned, the BPI could commence legal proceedings and its claim could rise to £4,000.Ī week later Mrs Price is still struggling to understand what happened. The summons informed Mrs Price that she had until July 1 to delete the files from her computer and write the BPI a cheque. Believing its members' rights had been infringed, the BPI had written to her internet service provider, Telewest, and obtained her address. As proof, Wiggin enclosed a screenshot showing other Bearshare users downloading song files by artists such as Coldplay, Britney Spears and Girls Aloud from Mrs Price's computer. That order, granted in March, read like a rollcall of recording industry names: Universal, Polydor, Mercury, Sony, EMI and Virgin.Īccording to Wiggin, the BPI had evidence that Mrs Price's computer had been used to copy nearly 1,300 songs over Bearshare, a popular file sharing program. To drive home its point the BPI had obtained a high court order on behalf of its members whose rights had been infringed.

The latest salvo in the BPI's ongoing campaign against music piracy, the letters were designed to send a clear message to file sharers - people who exchange pre-recorded music over the internet - that as far as the major record labels were concerned, file sharing was no different from shoplifting. On behalf of its client, the British Phonographic Industry, Wiggin, a high-powered media law firm specialising in the protection of music copyright, had just sent 30 similar letters to households across Britain. I thought: someone's messing me about.'īut the letter was deadly serious. 'I don't even use the computer - it's for my daughter. 'It said I'd been caught illegally downloading music off the internet and had to pay a £2,500 fine or else go to prison,' said Mrs Price yesterday, still recoiling from the shock.

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