9:00pm UK, Thursday October 07, 2004

Legal action is being taken against 28 people in the UK for illegally swapping music over the internet.

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CD sales downturn blamed on illegal downloads

The action by the British Phonographic Industry is the first of its kind in the UK, but legal action has already been taken in the US.          

The BPI, the UK's record industry's trade association, is targeting "major up-loaders".            

These are people who illegally make their music collections available on the net for other web users to share.            

The music industry says illegal file-sharing websites have hit their profits hard and they have no choice.               

It says it has experienced a 22% drop in sales worldwide, and a 50% dive in the sale of UK singles.

The BPI wants to target a hardcore 15% responsible for 75% of all illegal file-sharing.Its chairman Peter Jamieson said: "These are not people casually downloading the odd track.

"They are up-loading music on a massive scale, effectively stealing the livelihood of thousands of artists and the people who invest in them."

Lawyers for the phonographic industry say there is no excuse for downloading tracks illegally - as more than two-and-a-quarter-million have been bought legally on quality music sites set up by Napster and Apple.

The move, targeting sites like Grokster and Kazaa, comes after court action in the US resulted in a recovery in the record industry there.

Last year, a 12-year-old schoolgirl from New York paid £13,000 as an out-of-court settlement. She had been one of 261 Americans sued for downloading songs.

The BPI announced in March that it planned to take action and has since sent hundreds of thousands of instant internet messages to people, warning file-sharers they were being watched.

But the messages have not deterred the most prolific offenders, the BPI says.