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Albhy Galuten, vice president, Digital Media Technology Strategy at Sony America, told the Digital Media Summit in Los Angeles that the industry is not 'winning the battle against pirating'.

Galuten was taking part in a debate with legal experts to discuss whether the US record and movie industries' 'get tough' policies are effective against the scofflaws who use p2p networks to share music files without authorisation, a practice that the two industries regard as theft. File sharers, however, feel very differently. The panelists agreed that copyright is an irrelevance to p2p users, who do not accept that copying a digital file amounts to stealing.

The panelists also agreed that until consumers can get content as and when they want

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it through authorised channels, they will rely on less legitimate sources.

'If you are not delivering content the way users want it, how they want it, and in a legit way, piracy will fill the void,' said Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp lawyer Mark Litvack, who has been involved with Hollywood's anti-copying efforts.

Galuten's comments contradict various utterances from music industry figures who have claimed that the combination of litigation and the emergence of authorised digital music services such as iTunes are having an impact on levels of file sharing. Although they accept that p2p activity has not fallen, they believe that without industry campaigns it would be much greater, especially given the rise in broadband penetration.

The IFPI, the music industry's main international body, claimed in January that 35 per cent of file-sharers had cut back or stopped, while only 14 per cent have increased their p2p activity in the previous 12 months. It said that a three million people had either reduced or stopped illegal file-sharing in Europe and that half of those did so because of the fear of legal consequences.

It noted that, 'the findings are a positive indication that attitudes are changing - if these translate to behaviour it is reasonable to expect a reduction in numbers of file-sharers over the next 12 months and increasingly as growth in overall online penetration slows down.'