Scottish filesharer gets three years probation

A SCOTTISH COURT has sentenced a woman to a term of probation for illegal onlne filesharing.

Anne Muir, a 58 year old nurse from Ayr, is the first person in Scotland to be convicted for illegal filesharing of music. The Sheriff's Court in Ayr sentenced Muir to three years probation.

Muir was charged with distributing £54,000 worth of copyrighted music files and pleaded guilty earlier this month. She admitted to having made the music tracks available online using a peer-to-peer file sharing application.

Her filesharing activities were uncovered in an investigation by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Following their investigation the industry organisations filed a formal complaint with the Strathclyde Police.

Officers obtained a search warrant for Muir's home in 2008 and seized evidence including her computer equipment. They found 30,000 files on her hard drive that were being shared illegally.

District procurator fiscal for Ayr, Mirian Watson said, "Intelligence gathered by BPI and IFPI revealed that Anne Muir was a prolific user of a particular file sharing network based in the UK."

Whilst Muir was facing possible fines and potentially even time in prison, Andrew Crossley, a solicitor, was fined only £1,000 for exposing thousands of individuals' personal information gathered in a scheme to extract payments from alleged music filesharers.

Also, we're not exactly sure how the BPI and IFPI came up with the figure of £54,000 for a bunch of karaoke tracks, but this all happened in the same month that the BPI said that digital music sales were up last year.

While this case was being prosecuted, the BPI announced that retail spending on digital albums had increased by 23 per cent and that total spending broke the £1bn mark in the UK since digital downloading started in 2004. µ