CD piracy flourishes

SALES of pirate music CDs of top singers, such as Madonna, Celine Dion and Robbie Wiliams, now exceed more than 500 million a year and account for one in every five sold, industry's watchdog said yesterday.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimates that organised crime costs the industry nearly £3 billion in sales, while Internet piracy is the formidable new enemy. Jay Berman, the federation chairman, said copyright piracy was "diversifying fast, ranging from the organised crime

syndicates to Internet pirate sites, offering stolen music to millions free".

Australia, Eastern Europe and Latin America have the highest piracy levels, while Southeast Asia produced the most pirate copies.

Will Internet pirates kill the record industry?

It reads like an unusually coherent Jeffrey Archer thriller. Russian gangsters take over the London underworld! Italian investigators close in on the Mafia! Dutch police infiltrate a pirate ring! Illicit

Ukrainian loot seized en route for Uruguay, and bootleggers tracked down deep in the Paraguayan jungle!

Yet this is not fiction. It is the annual Music Piracy report from IFPI, the body that represents the worldwide interests of the record companies. But what a report! For gripping tales of misdeeds and revenge, recounted in a tone of unrelenting moral fury, its only rival is the Old Testament.

Pirate recordings, it seems, now account for a third of all the world's CDs and tapes, and they are allegedly costing the record companies £3 billion in lost sales. But the companies are hitting

back - raiding CD bootleggers, seizing illicit shipments, suing dealers and importers. It's Boy's Own stuff. I want the film rights.

And, sadly, it's also utterly irrelevant. For, however much the record companies huff and puff about CD bootlegging, at least this is a tangible problem that can be tackled by conventional means. A far bigger potential threat comes from something the companies cannot seize, raid, repress or even easily sue. It is the downloading of illicit music files via the Internet.

Thanks to two little inventions - MP3 and Napster - a billion music files are now thought to be downloaded illegally each year. MP3 is the format that allows music to be transferred over

the Net. Napster, invented last year by a bright American college student, is a system that allows participants to pool their files with everyone else's, thus building up a "free" (but largely pirated) library of half a million titles.

Clearly, if Internet piracy grows at its present pace it will kill the record industry within three years and blow a crater in the economics of the music business as we know it. The problem for the companies is: how do you stop it? Prosecute Napster or its new rival, the even more shadowy Gnutella? Difficult. After all, it isn't Napster's inventor who is breaking the law, only people who use his technology to download copyrighted material. Is Colt sued each time an armed robber brandishes one of its guns?

So perhaps the reason why yesterday's Music Piracy report is so coy about the Net is that the music industry doesn't have a clue how to deal with it. Tucked away among all the tales of derring-do raids on bootleg-CD factories is a mere half-page on Internet piracy. "IFPI's response," it tells us, "is a combination of education of consumers and, where necessary, strategic litigation to remove infringing sites."

Really? At the last count there were 100,000 sites offering illicit MP3 files. In that context, "strategic litigation" is about as much use as a peashooter aimed at a stampede of buffalo. So what about the "education of consumers"? Again, too little, too late. The Napster concept of files shared and information pooled goes right to the heart of what we expect from the Internet.

Whether it's news, poetry, music or recipes, we now anticipate finding it for free on our computer screens.

The fact that much of this stuff is someone else's "intellectual property" cuts no ice with the students who most frequently download music via Napster. Indeed, the knowledge that they are ripping off fat-cat corporations probably makes the music even sweeter to their ears. Nor can one detect much sympathy for the multinational entertainment corporations among the wider public.

Yet their bosses continue to rant as though they have been personally mugged. Last week Michael Eisner, chief executive of Disney, even harangued the US Congress on the subject.

Internet piracy, he told them, was nothing less than a threat to the Constitution. Oh, come off it, Mikey. The US Constitution is a many-splendoured thing, but where does it say that entertainment corporations have an inalienable right to make huge profits for ever more?

Instead of trying to repress Internet advances, why don't the big boys of showbiz turn it to their advantage? The answer is that they are trying to do exactly that. The vast mergers of the past

few months, such as the £130 billion deal between Time Warner, EMI and the Internet provider AOL, were all about muscling in on the Web and blasting cheeky minnows out of the pool. But the minnows know how to exploit the nooks and crannies of cyberspace, while the giant corporations seem like

cumbersome dinosaurs - inflexible, slow-witted and perhaps ultimately doomed.

And if they die, will music die with them? Of course not. It's possible that without the big record companies around we may have to contemplate a world bereft of vastly overhyped teenage

totty miming gormlessly on Top of the Pops. But civilisation will somehow stagger on.

Source: The Times 15th June 2000