Pirated music growing out of control, industry group says

Pirated music growing out of control, industry group says

Matt Beer, Agence France-Presse, San Francisco

Two out of every five music recordings sold worldwide in 2001
were illegal copies, with China, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and
Mexico leading the trend, a global recording industry trade group
said Tuesday.

Sales of pirate CDs alone rose to 950 million last year from
640 million a year earlier, the International Federation of the
Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported.

With CDs and cassettes combined, the group said, 1.9 million
bogus recordings flooded global markets last year, resulting in
the two out of five figure.

In 2000, that ratio was one out of every five, the group
reported.

According to the IFPI, music piracy accounted for some 4.3
billion dollars last year. That was only a slight increase in
value from 4.2 billion dollars in 2000, because of "sharply
falling prices of pirate CD-R discs," the organization said.

The group said that illegal music sales now outnumber legal
music sales in 25 countries -- predominantly "developing
markets."

The group called for a global crackdown on illegal CD copying.

"Tolerance of piracy fosters lawlessness and tax evasion,"
said IFPI member Rick Dobbis, who is also president of Sony Music
International.

Dobbis said pirating CDs cuts off local record sellers from
earnings of the legal distribution chain.

"Some of the hardest hit victims of this growing problem are
local economies," he said in a statement accompanying IFPI's
figures.

"Owners of local record stores, CD plant workers, marketing,
promotion and distribution people, and workers from every aspect
of the complex business of making and distributing music are all
affected."

The industry group said CD pirating is now equally divided
between "large-scale" operations and smaller garage-based
producers.

According to the report, China tops the list of illegal sales,
with 90 percent of music sales being fake, followed by Indonesia
(85 percent), Russia (65 percent), Mexico (60 percent) and
Brazil (55 percent).

The IFPI said that South Asia "remains the hub of pirate CD
manufacturing." Seven out of 10 illegal disks come from the
region, the group reported.

In April, the London-based group reported that the global
music market fell five percent in value and saw a 6.5 percent
drop in unit sales in 2001. The IFPI argues that drop is due to
pirating.

The IFPI is affiliated with the Recording Industry Association
of America, the Washington-based trade group waging legal battles
on behalf of the recording industry against Internet music sites.

The RIAA succeeded in shutting down the pioneering digital
music swapping site Napster last year on charges of wholesale
copyright infringement.

The recording industry and Hollywood have been waging a
largely futile fight to stop piracy. That battle has been made
extremely difficult with the advent of digital media, which
allows someone with a simple computer to make pristine copies of
CDs and now DVDs.