In an attempt to stem the flow of illegal Internet file sharing, the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has commenced new legal assaults against practice of music file sharing in Europe, Asia, and now, South America. The IFPI, the leading lobby group for the music industry, has set into motion this new round of legal maneuvers abroad to end the practice of file sharing, insisting that it's robbing the industry and artists worldwide.

Targeting some 2,100 peer-to-peer (P2P) networks users in the U.K, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Italy, Argentina, Singapore and Hong Kong, the international group has been ratcheting up the fight against piracy in the hopes of saving the struggling music industry.

Illegal file-sharers in Sweden have been marked for special attention. Sweden has been selected as the launching point for the latest campaign of lawsuits, and rightly so, as industry officials point out, since Sweden has been known in the music industry as a 'haven for piracy,' only recently making it illegal to download copyrighted material.

Sweden won't be alone. Music file-sharers in Germany, Finland, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, Iceland , Ireland and Japan will soon feel the bite of a $3,000 fine if caught and convicted. The most common P2P networks cited by IFPI include BitTorrent, DirectConnect, eDonkey, FastTrack, Gnutella, SoulSeek and WinMx.

With roughly 3,800 of legal actions taken against music pirates, mostly males between the ages of 20 and 30, in 16 countries outside the United States, IFPI officials insist that prosecution is a necessary tool to protect artists and a besieged music industry.

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TJ Nelson is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing
Athena's Shadow
<http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=34163>. Set in
Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena's Shadow follows the adventures
of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long
forgotten family mystery.  Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of
little help in her quest.  Along with her best friends, an attractive
Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading
memory that holds the key to why Grace's great-grandmother, Athena, shot
her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931. Traversing the line between
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uncover Athena's true crime.