UK song-swappers 'could be sued'
The UK record industry is concerned about piracy
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has warned it may sue people who swap songs on the internet illegally.
The trade group's director general, Andrew Yeates, said it was hoping to encourage new, legitimate services.
"We want to increase awareness of the legal implications of file-sharing. If these are not working, there has to be a degree of enforcement," he said.
The BPI said the "disturbing increase" in piracy was making legal action against users "increasingly likely".
"The music industry will defend its rights under the law whether it is against traders selling illegally copied CDs on market stalls, or people uploading illegally over the internet," a spokesman said.
"The BPI has made no final decision on taking legal action, but nobody should be in any doubt that such uses of filesharing networks are illegal and are harming the health of British music. We will take legal action if we are forced to."
Industry-backed services such as iTunes, which is widely used in the US, are expected to be launched in Europe later this year, and the BPI wants to encourage users to switch to these when they are launched.
Mr Yeates said if they were successful and illicit song-swapping levels fell, legal action may not be necessary.
Record firms in the US have already started cases against file-sharers.
But the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) actions generated bad publicity after it emerged a 12-year-old girl had been targeted, along with a 66-year-old grandmother who was alleged to have been downloading rap records.
Speaking at a London conference about music and technology, Mr Yeates said any legal crackdown would be "proportional".
Talks were taking place with internet service providers across Europe to streamline a process for identifying those who distribute the most songs, he said.
The move comes despite healthy album sales for the UK industry.
Album sales in the UK rose by 7.6% in 2003 to a record high, fuelled by falling CD prices.
But the singles market continues to fall - with a drop of 30% last year.
A BPI spokesman told BBC News Online: "We had a great year for albums last year because of the amount of great music around, but the singles market is in decline because it's so easy to download the track from the internet instead of buying them."
Critics of the music industry's legal action say it is not proportional to the problem of file-sharing piracy.
They argue that the world-wide music market is falling as it competes with an explosion in DVD and video game sales
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3395161.stm