The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a record labels’ body, has given its backing to a global campaign that was launched today promoting safe and legal music downloading amongst young people. The campaign is run by Childnet, a children’s Internet charity, and aims to provide guidance to parents and teachers.

The BPI sights a number of recent studies, which indicate that one third of young people regularly download music from peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, three times more than the proportion of those using licensed, safe and legal music services. By comparison most parents lack the awareness and knowledge to monitor their child’s activities:


The BPI is currently trying to encourage ISPs to adopt some form of "three-strikes" style self-regulation, which could see customers caught downloading illegal music being disconnected from their provider. To date most providers appear to be resisting these calls, sighting a multitude of technical, legal and commercial concerns (see our article 'To Ban or Not to Ban (Illegal File Sharers)').