Who'd have thought it, there's a downside to Simon Cowell's creepy karaoke circus. Yes, it's messing up the music industry, not just with terrible covers of Biffy Clyro songs and manufactured chart robots, but with the biggest danger to the word today, Susan Boyle wannabe's.
Scottish woman Anne Muir has made legal history when after being prosecuted for illegally downloading more than 30,000 files worth nearly £55,000, in a joint operation by police and the British Music Recording Industry.
Rather than chucking the 58-year-old in jail, sympathetic Judge Jack McGowan placed Muir on probation for three years as she had "suffered clinical depression over a number of years", was a first time offender and did not profit from the downloads.
The official story is that Muir suffers from obsessive, compulsive personality disorder and as a result become obsessed with her road to stardom. Well she's reached fame now, but for all the wrong reasons. Muir had illegally downloaded 24,243 karaoke files on her computer and 7493 music files in order to aid her singing career.
Tackling full-scale music pirates would surely be of more help to the music industry than dragging a deluded karaoke fan through court, but then £55,000 is a Hell of a lot of money and it must be made clear that digital property is the same as physical property. She'd be treated much more harshly if she'd stolen 50 grand worth of physical CDs from HMV, whether she has OCD or not.
But ultimately it seems the police and record companies are fighting a losing battle when it comes to file sharing and this ‘arrest the big players and make a big song and dance out of it to scare everyone into buying CDs and legal downloads’, is obviously not working.