Piracy Over the Net Is Down, Firm Says

Music piracy over the Internet has declined since the record industry started threatening to sue individual users of popular but unauthorized file-sharing networks, a market research group said.

Port Washington, N.Y.-based NPD Group said the number of households acquiring music files began to fall in May, immediately after the Recording Industry Assn. of America launched a campaign threatening individual file sharers with legal action.

NPD said it based its findings on information collected continuously from the PCs of 40,000 NPD online panelists. It projects that music files acquired, which include songs either swapped illegally, obtained through paid downloading sites or taken from CDs, dropped to 655 million files in June from a high of 852 million files in April.