In the new issue of Music Week we deliver a very special report looking at the threat posed by piracy to the music business.
While many believe that piracy was a welcome casualty of the streaming age, it is far from a problem consigned to the pages of history. Sharan Ghuman, PRS For Music’s anti-piracy unit manager, for one, was quick to tell Music Week about the intensifying and mutating nature of the modern threat posed.
“In December last year, the European Commission published its first Counterfeit And Piracy Watch List,” said Ghuman. “It highlighted online and physical marketplaces outside of the European Union that engage in or facilitate substantial IPR infringements. The list featured cyberlockers [who pay uploaders a cut of their ad revenue], P2P services, unlicensed download stores, illegal streaming sites and stream-ripping sites [websites that allow users to download content from licensed services by inputting a link to that content on the licensed service] as areas of concern. [There’s] a wide variety of piracy methods that we are continuing to tackle.”
Yet the threat is not localised exclusively to digital music. As Paola Monaldi, content protection operations manager at BPI, told Music Week, “The vinyl revival and resilient demand for CDs, although good for the legal market, has resulted in the illegal physical market causing an estimated annual loss of around £40m.”
There’s a wide variety of piracy methods that we are continuing to tackle
Sharan Ghuman
There are a variety of ways organisations have been combating piracy, and BPI have been notching up many victories of late.
“Marketplace platforms are monitored for counterfeit items," revealed Monaldi. "Whilst BPI’s scope is the UK market, notices of claimed infringement filed to eBay and Amazon UK typically result in the listings being suspended across all-country platforms. Thanks to measures implemented by Amazon after 33 ads were reported by BPI in 2018, there have been few problems since. Separately, 24,000 eBay listings were removed for selling unlicensed bootleg albums/vinyl.”
Monaldi continued: “BPI investigations into piracy led to a huge Northern Soulcriminal case – resulting in the seizure of 50,000 counterfeit vinyl records and the conviction of a criminal gang. BPI also enlisted law enforcement support to track offenders behind a Russian wave of unofficial Greatest Hits, resulting in large confiscation orders and the prosecution of the biggest players.”
Effective anti-piracy measures are not, however, just about responding to threats – but rather proactively trying to prevent. To that end, Ben Rush, CTO/founder AudioLock, told Music Week that education is crucial.
“Our children have grown up in an ‘online and free’ world which is simply not the case,” he explained. “Everyone has to survive and that has to come from somewhere. A little change per person could go a long way.”
Pick up the latest issue to read our full report on anti-piracy.
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