news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7029229.stm

Now I'm not defending infringing copyright laws,but the response to this is absolutely ludicrious.
A woman,one of millions online,sharing illegal music has been ordered to pay $222,000 compensation!It wasn't that long ago they prosecuted a 12 year old for the same crime.
This is not the way to stop piracy.Firstly the governments need to end the monopolic conditions enjoyed by those few companies that dominate the market.Making music competitive,and acting in the same way as other businesses will finally drag this delapidated industry out into the 21st century.
Expecting the public to fund outrageously expensive videos and artist advances by paying through the nose for a piece of plastic with some noises on it has been a disaster.I've hardly ever heard the person in the street say a good word about record companies,or the prices they charge.A real recipe for encouraging piracy,if ever there was one.
The net,and digital technology has changed how we use music forever,but alas the record companies still live in a dream world of vinyl inspired monopolism.
The huge new markets of Eastern europe,and China have in effect just ignored copyright laws,and their governments are loath to fall out with their populace to protect greedy Bourgeois monopolists.Act now,or drift away into irrelevance.
Just my thoughts,and I'm sure others will no doubt disagree.

I don`t think for a minute they will get a penny out of her, she probably has not got the money for one, but a case like this was allways going to happen to somebody completely ordinary.(again)

If we are going to make a note of how many people actually have "illegal" music on their computers, the list and cases could go on forever.
How many got sent a copy of a song as a favour by a friend, not knowing it`s original origin?
Probably most of us at some time.

It will be interesting and terryfying, of course to see how far these cases can be dragged back and how many there will be.
I played a pile of old cd`s last night on the pc, and many of them, whilst playing in I-Tunes, were, I assumed to old to have any sort of codec on them.
However, I played my original copy of the Stone Roses from 1990 and it was picked up correctly whilst others came up as "unknown".
I`m not sure how coding is added to existing works,(in private collections) but it would seem that the industry was prepared for it in some way but did little.
This could have course had been done earlier, as I said, rather than this token "too little too late" effort, UNLESS, the industry feels quite secure after all, in the knowledge that it will claim back all the illegal file sharing monies due eventually.

If that`s the case, was a dreadful debt chasing job for the future of entertainment it is.

In Napier-Bell's Black Vinyl White Powder he predicts the internet will bring about the end of large conglomerate record companies and put the power in the hand's of artists.

Even more reason we can expect the government to control our freedom on the net.

Mart,

CD's don't have a codec as such to identify them on PC's.

Once you put a CD into your media player it connects to a database such as CDDB which recognises cd's from their length, amount of tracks, track times etc which makes most cd's unique.

It has trouble with home burned cd's but you can add that info into the database if you want.

Thanks for that Vince.

That would figure why The Stone Roses come up and Sarah Jory does not.

I assume a homeburnt CD from Napster comes up.