GERMAN LABELS RELUCTANTLY JOIN RIAA CRUSADE

We're slowly seeing the IFPI shake all its global members into line with its dominant member's insistence that legal action is the only way to respond to filesharing - now, after years of trying to avoid the PR disasters and pointless cash burn-through of litigation, the German Phonographic Association is doing what the RIAA wants and sending out legal threats to people it believes are illegally sharing files online. 1,300 people have won the lottery, paying out an average of EUR4000. As is the case worldwide, nobody actually seems to have gone as far as court with this, being bounced into "settling" in the big label's favour under the threat of the cash demands rising from outrageous to stratospheric.

We're having trouble making the GPA figures add up:

He did, however, state that the number of music tracks offered illegally on file-sharing platforms rose by three percent to 900 million from January to June, while the number of legal online platforms is also increasing in many countries at the same time. The lobby group pointed out that the number of songs offered illegally in Germany plummeted in 2004 from 600 million in 2003 to 382 million.

Now, we're not quite sure how the figure of tracks was 382 million in 2004, 900 million now, and yet this is meant to be a "three percent" increase - it looks more like a threefold increase to us. Unless the numbers are just meaningless figures and nobody really has the ability to count the number of tracks available online because how would you even actually start to do that?

music downloads germany