Legal

Scottish woman convicted for file-sharing

By | Published on Wednesday 11 May 2011

File-Sharing

A 58 year old Scottish woman has been convicted for copyright crimes after she made 30,000 music files, over two thirds of them karaoke files, available online without a licence via a P2P file-sharing network.

Strathclyde Police investigated Anne Muir after receiving complaints from record label trade bodies BPI and IFPI. They raided her home in Ayr in 2008 and found over 30,000 files on her hard drive which were being made accessible to others via the DirectoConnect P2P file-sharing network.

She pleaded guilty to distributing content without a licence from copyright owners  “to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright”. She won’t be sentenced until the end of the month, so it remains to be seen how severe the penalty for this file-sharing crime will turn out to be.

It is relatively rare for individual file-sharers to be pursued through the criminal courts, more commonly those who illegally share music online face civil action from the record companies. That said, the UK industry, which quickly discarded the sue-the-fans approach of its US counterpart, has looked for assistance from the authorities before, most notably in targeting those in the Oink file-sharing community, albeit with mixed success.

Aside from saving the music industry the expense of pursuing civil legal action, arguably you target individual file-sharers through the courts primarily to deter others from file-sharing, and the thought you could be prosecuted for file-sharing, rather than being sued for damages, is undeniably a stronger deterrent.

Muir’s legal rep told the court his client did not file-share for commercial gain, and became such a prolific file-sharer because she suffered from a severe obsessive personality disorder. Defence lawyer Lorenzo Alonzi said: “It has to be stressed that this offence was not committed from any desire to make money. Mrs Muir was not in any way trying to distribute on a large scale, she had a very big quantity of these files because she was hoarding – a symptom of the severe obsessive personality disorder that she suffers from”.

He continued: “She has, for many years, suffered from bouts of depression, which causes her to have extremely low self-esteem. Learning this new technology and picking up new skills gave her self-esteem a boost. But to be allowed into the [file-sharing] network she had to have a certain number of files already. She suffers from an obsessive behaviour disorder, which has been heightened recently because of problems within her family and the stress of this case. The obsessive behaviour is the explanation for Mrs Muir having so many of these files, it causes her to hoard things. She has expressed genuine remorse for this and is severely embarrassed about it”.

Commenting on the case, Mirian Watson, District Procurator Fiscal for Ayr, told reporters: “Illegally flouting copyright laws is tantamount to theft and not only deprives legitimate companies and artists of earnings, but also undermines the music industry as a whole. We will continue to work effectively with law enforcement in this area and to apply our robust prosecution policy”.

Meanwhile the BPI’s anti-piracy chief David Wood said: “The defendant illegally distributed music on a massive scale, causing significant harm to legitimate music companies. We will not comment further since the case awaits sentence. We would like to thank the Strathclyde Police and the Procurator Fiscal Service in Ayr for their diligent work on this investigation”.



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