JUST HOW MUCH MONEY DOES CHRIS MARTIN NEED?

So, this is what the BPI's desperate bid to grub a few quid off illegal downloading looks like: 53 year-old Sylvia Price has been handed a bill by the BPI for GBP4,000 - they claim her daughter was uploading songs to the net. Because Ms Price doesn't have that sort of money, she's preparing herself to go to prison.

Does Chris Martin really need the money that much?

(And while we're delighted the Guardian is highlighting this case, we're a little disappointed it prints the claim that "thousands of people use file-sharing software which allows them to swap music files, costing the music industry £1.3bn a year in lost sales" without any indication that the figure of GBP1.3billion is at best a top-end figure from a wildly wide-ranging guesstimate rather than a fact.)

Ms Price didn't know what her daughter was doing; Emily didn't know what she was doing was wrong. And didn't the BPI claim they were interested in going after the "big uploaders"? A fourteen year-old girl? Either the BPI has abandoned its policy of only pursuing the most serious offenders, or else their problems must be very slight indeed. (A less charitable point of view would suggest they've decided to go for soft targets, and by targetting parents, they've got a much better chance of getting a cash payment without the cost and expense of actually going to court.)

But it looks like they're going to have to take Mrs Price to court after all. And have her thrown in prison. The BPI's Steve Redmond churns out the almost-standard response:

"If we don't demonstrate that copyright law has teeth, we're going to be out of business and countless musicians will lose their livelihood too."

But Noel Gallagher isn't going broke; and smaller artists face much more serious problems because of their contracts with the record labels. Is the BPI really worth saying that to make some sort of point they really need parents to be torn from their families and dumped into jail? More to the point, are we going to allow our overstretched prisons to become part of a revenue-raising campaign for Sony and Universal?

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