Internet piracy IIPA’s No 1
p2pnet.net News:- What’s the difference between piracy and file sharing?
- Piracy is a multi-billion dollar underground industry involving smuggling, counterfeiting, duplication, and so on. Those engaged in it are hard-core, highly organized criminals.
- File sharing means people share with each other. No money changes hands. Those engaged in it are ordinary people. Your next-door neighbours. Your brother. Your aunt. Your friends at school. Entertainment industry customers.
The first group has absolutely nothing to do with the second. And yet the entertainment industry never loses an opportunity to lump them together.
In its Special 301 report, the IIPA (International Intellectual Property Alliance), owned by the big software firms, the record label cartel and major movie studios, says American industries took an estimated $25 billion to $30 billion in global losses from illegal copies of films, software, video games and other copyright industries.
That’s an almost unimaginable amount of money. And organized criminals, not file sharers, are getting it.
Yet in its six global trade priorities for 2005, the IIPA has “Internet piracy” [read file sharing] up front as the Number One item for attention, with electronic commerce and the WIPO Treaties behind it.
Number 2 is optical disc piracy and its effective regulation; 3, piracy by organized crime syndicates; 4, end-user piracy of business software and other copyrighted materials; 5, piracy of books and journals; and 6, improving copyright protection and enforcement, including through free trade agreements.
The report will go, tomorrow, to the US Trade Representative’s office (USTR) which black-lists countries it says aren’t living up to expectations in enforcing IIPA owners’ copyrights.
“IIPA’s submission discusses copyright protection and/or enforcement problems in 67 countries/territories, of which it recommends that 42 be placed on an appropriate USTR list,” it says. “Twenty-three of these countries/territories do not have a 301 ranking recommendation but do merit attention by the U.S. government.
“IIPA also identifies two countries where FTA dispute settlement proceedings should be initiated, if prompt resolution of outstanding issues is not reached.”
And the organization has placed Russia, Pakistan and the Ukraine at the top of its hit list.
“Russia’s copyright piracy problem remains one of the most serious in the world,” says the IIPA. “Piracy rates for most sectors are estimated at around 80% in 2004 and conservative estimated losses exceed $1.7 billion. Despite the repeated efforts of industry and the U.S. government to convince the Russian government to provide meaningful and deterrent enforcement of its copyright and other laws against OD factories and all types of piracy – including some of the most open and notorious websites selling unauthorized materials in the world, such as www.allofmp3.com – little progress has been made over the years regarding this egregious situation. Meanwhile, piracy continues unabated in the domestic market and pirate exports continue to spread across both Eastern and Western Europe.”
Pakistan must be designated as a Priority Foreign Country, the report states, continuing, “The Pakistani government has largely ignored the growing production of pirated U.S. copyright products by illicit optical disc factories. Exports of these pirate goods continue to flood world markets. Efforts to persuade the Pakistani government to halt such pirate production and export have, to date, produced few results. Furthermore, the Pakistani government has failed to take adequate measures to stop rampant book piracy and commercial photocopying, which collectively decimate the market for legitimate publishers.”
On the Ukraine, the IIPA “recommends” that it, too, is named as a Priority Foreign Country and that, “trade sanctions should continue accordingly in 2005. This includes the continued suspension of Ukraine’s duty-free trade benefits under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP); those benefits were suspended in August 2001 due to Ukraine’s copyright shortcomings.
“Ukraine has failed to effectively implement the 2000 Joint Action Plan signed by then-President Clinton and President Kuchma.”
It also wants 15 countries to go on the Priority Watch List in 2005: Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lebanon, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand.
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February 11th, 2005 at 3:46 pm
It’s nice to see oppressive governments turned one against the other. Any Chinese citizen want me to host human rights or union pages here in the U.S. that the Chinese governemnt doesn’t like?
Yup, it’s the people of the world against the governments and cartels of the world. The fight is on.
February 11th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
Yes.. it conforms completely to russian copyright law.
I’m so sorry that their copyright law focuses on compensation rather than control and obstinate obstruction of technological development like it does in the united states.. but they do compensate rights holders with royalties similar to what the riaa pays to its artists as per contract. no.. it’s not the 60 cents the RIAA members gouge from stores like itunes, but the few cents per copy the RIAA pays to its artists are similarly paid by allofmp3 for the copies they sell through their site.
Again, I’m sorry the riaa doesnt get their strangling control, but unlike the US, the russian copyright law still has this novel thing called BALANCE. maybe we’ll get it back some time?
February 11th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
You know the IIPA really should try harder. They’re just not giving enough free advertising to specific sites like allofmp3.com
<grin>
February 11th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
Julian, is it true you have shares in allofmp3? heh
Cheers!
February 11th, 2005 at 6:04 pm
The biggest lie these crooks keep foisting on the world is the “loss estimates”. They are calculated as if every “illegal” copy of software/content that was “stolen” would have been legitimately purchased (at full retail of course) if it had not been “stolen”. I would bet that represents an artificial inflation of at least 1000% dollars wise of what would have been purchased in reality if “piracy” was not a factor. And I think that’s a conservative estimate of the exaggeration. If most folks could not get this stuff cheap or free, they would just not buy it, period. Why? To most of us this content that they (over)value so highly is just not worth anywhere near what the “owners” feel that can charge for it.
February 11th, 2005 at 11:00 pm
There is no way I would have paid $1 per song or $15.00 or more for a CD for 90% of my collection. The music I’ve downloaded is great but given a choice between paying bills and buying music. Bills win. Allofmp3.com changes that equation for me. I’m willing to pay 5-20 cents per song especially when I get to choose formats etc like Allofmp3 allows!
Record companies have to realize some day that they could sell a whole lot more if the prices were reduced. I’ll bet that the record compaines would love to have the money the pirates make.
One last thing, I wonder how many people would have actually gone out and bought the CD of the music they downloaded. I know that there is a lot of music downloaded that people would have never bought. Allofmp3 allows me to take a risk with an unknown artist.
maxx8
February 12th, 2005 at 9:48 am
Heh!
I’m really not that unusual. I’m something of a music fanatic but with somewhat left field tastes. I discover new musics via things like last.fm forums. I never get singles, only whole albums. When there’s something I discover I want, the sequence goes something like this.
- Allofmp3
- Soulseek
- Amazon wishlist
- Direct from the artist or label’s website
- Amazon
Allofmp3’s catalogue is pretty large and they’re quite good for less well known grooves. It’s just plain easier to pay the money for well ripped, well tagged, named and tidy files.
If they don’t have it, then I’ll put the effort in (at minimum wage) to find UberRips on soulseek. This takes some time and invariably involves tidying ID3 tags and filenames even when you’ve managed to find the files from a sharer with some bandwidth who stays up long enough to grab them.
If that fails I’ll just wait for someone to buy them from my wishlist.
And if I really can’t wait, then I’ll try and buy direct from the artist or label. Or if that’s impossible, then from Amazon.
Every CD that comes into the house gets ripped immediately and stored. I’m too tired of the kids leaving CDs around unboxed to get scratched, lost and destroyed.
The point here is that I really can’t be bothered to battle with P2P downloading when I can pay a reasonable amount and save the time and effort. So it’s really not AllOfMp3.com that I’m promoting. It’s the business model. Sell me something I want (LAME MP3 with no DRM) at a reasonable price (~10-20c per track) and I’ll buy it rather than download it via P2P.
It’s a straight economic market decision. Money+Quality+Ease = Free+Effort <> Expensive Crap
What I really want to see is a mainstream western AllOfMp3.com where the catalogue is all >12 months old and includes everything ever recorded. I figure that wouldn’t get Apple’s measly 250m downloads, it would get more like 250B. And whoever did it would get very, very rich in the process.
And I will not buy anything with DRM. Just Say No To DRM!