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Taiwan's music industry suffered a setback yesterday when the Shihlin District Court found a local peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing operator not guilty of infringing intellectual property rights. In the nation's first ruling on file-sharing cases, the court found that Weber Wu, president of Ezpeer ( which provides a for-fee platform for subscribers to swap files ), did not engage in reproducing or publicly distributing works of copyright holders. The court also said that current laws and regulations do not specifically ban or limit file-sharing activities
The music industry claimed another victory in its legal war against file-sharing networks on Friday when a Taiwan court convicted the service Kuro of criminal copyright infringement and sentenced its operators to jail terms of up to three years.The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said it was the first criminal conviction of a peer-to-peer file sharing service, which distributes information between users instead of through a central server.Kuro, which charged users to access music files, was fined T$3 million, or about $90,000, IFPI said. Most of the songs available using Kuro were by local artists, none of whom were paid by the service, the music industry trade group said."This is good news for artists and the music industry, particularly in Taiwan, which has had a history of piracy problems," said Lauri Rechardt, IFPI's director of licensing and litigation.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said it was the first criminal conviction of a peer-to-peer file sharing service, which distributes information between users instead of through a central server.
Government measures to clamp down on illegal movie downloads are having very little impact, and infringements of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) remain a thorny issue, People First Party Legislator George Hsieh said.Hsieh yesterday demonstrated how easy it is to download a copy of Ang Lee's award-winning film Brokeback Mountain using BitTorrent software."Although the film is still on the movie circuit, anyone can easily see it for free by downloading a link from a BitTorrent Web site," said Hsieh, who listed 10 sites hosting links to the movie."We haven't had much progress in combating copyright infringements of music, motion pictures and other works of art on the Internet," Chen Shu-mei, an official of the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Intellectual Property Office, told the press conference yesterday.Hsieh expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of the government's strategy to combat Internet piracy, saying that the authorities should try to force file-sharing sites to close down, instead of punishing the sites' users.
The recent libel indictment against the popular rapper Jeff Huang for a sarcastic song he wrote three years ago about legalizing mp3 downloads sparked controversy on Thursday. Huang was indicted on Wednesday on charges of aggravated libel. The lyrics of one of his songs claimed that 43 legislators, including former Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chiu Yi-ying and Chang Hsueh-shun, are involved in attempting to murder Taiwanese music and that they support pirated music. The lyrics further suggested that the legislators should be on the alert, even mentioning that they might "die an unexpected death." The lyrics also hinted that the peer-to-peer (P2P) Web sites Kuro and Ezpeer that allow subscribers to download music must have offered bribes to the legislators, as a code was being proposed for P2P operators. If Huang is convicted, he would face a maximum of two years in jail. However, Huang insisted that there was no need for him to apologize as he was simply supporting Taiwanese music, helping to protect copyrighted materials and showing fierce opposition to pirated music.
Kuro, Taiwan's best-known unauthorised file-sharing service, has today paid a substantial sum in damages to the recording industry and agreed to shut down its copyright-infringing p2p operation.Under the settlement with record companies represented by IFPI Taiwan, Kuro's operator, Taipei-based Fashion Now Co Ltd, will stop distributing its p2p software programme immediately and will ensure closure of the copyright-infringing service by 15th October.Kuro, its directors and president all received a criminal conviction for copyright infringement in September 2005. The service was run as a commercial subscription business, with an estimated 500,000 registered users in Taiwan and mainland China. The operator says it will launch a new legitimate music downloads website but will sever all links with the old infringing service.It follows major settlements with the recording industry by Korea's Soribada and Taiwan's Ezpeer.
