Illegal file-sharing rife‚ report finds

Despite high-profile efforts to combat it‚ illegal file-sharing remains rife‚ according to a new report.

Illegal file-sharing by internet users is still rife, according to a new report from PRS for Music, which collects royalties on behalf of UK artists.

Its research shows that the songs of some of the most popular musicians in the UK have been passed on without payment 14 million times in the last year.

This is despite a number of high-profile cases relating to the intellectual property issue, including the Pirate Bay trial, which saw the website's founders jailed for breaching copyright.

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish site that points its visitors in the direction of torrent links to music and movie files held on the computers of its users.

New legislation is also being put forward in many countries that could see internet users punished for engaging in file-sharing activity.

Indeed, laws have been passed in France that will see internet service providers cut off access to those who ignore repeated warnings about downloading copyrighted content for free.

According to the PRS for Music report, the top 100 albums in the billboard charts during the final week of April were illegally downloaded around 58,000 times each, the Telegraph reports.

One album - The Fame by Lady GaGa - was swapped by the users of peer-to-peer websites 388,000 times during the seven-day period.

However, separate research by PRS for Music also shows that internet file-sharing may actually be helping some of the most popular musicians gain even more popularity among the public.

Indeed, it shows that the most downloaded songs on peer-to-peer websites tend to be the same ones that appear at the top of the international music charts, the BBC reports.