War cry by IMI to stop music piracy

The music industry worldwide would be suffering a loss of 40 per cent by 2010 due to piracy, mostly in the retail form.

Among the many challenges, the advent of Internet has made detection of the piracy difficult, says Secretary General of the Indian Music Industry association Savio D'Souza.

''We need to draw a new strategy to fight the piracy through internet. It is easy to detect the theft done through cassettes and videos and programmes aired by radio and TV, but is very difficult to keep track of downloads from websites,'' Mr D'Souza told UNI.

Besdies these, there were so many other ways in which music was being pirated like in ring tones and public peformances etc, he said.

Mr D'Souza called for increasing the level of awareness about copyright laws amongst enforcement agencies, professional users and members of the public.

He said pirates of music operate like small time pick pocket stealing small quantities everyday. For example one CD writer is capable of producing 12 CD in one hour which means 240 CDs in a day, equal to 72,000 CD per year at Rs. 40. Thus one CD writer has a potential of producing goods worth Rs 2,88,000.

Mr D'Souza said if one takes a look at some basic facts about India of today, one can realise the magnitude of the music industry and also of the pircay.

''This country of more than a billion people which has a GDP growth at 9 per cent per annum has more than the 250 millions mobile phone users and is the 5th largest market in CDs and cassettes.

There were more than 250 radio stations and 300 television stations, and more than 10,000 venues to perform events/ shows,'' and in this scenario, one can well realise the magnitude of loss of the music industry if piracy was allowed to continue,'' he said.

Loss of intellectual property, however, was not limited only to the music industry, other industries such as software and gaming industries were losing a major part of their revenue to pirates, he said.

Mr D'Souza said the IMI had suggested creation of a structure to fight piracy in streets. IMI has been helping the police through its anti-piracy teams that detect pircay in homes and streets and inform the police.

Pointing out that the IMI teams had helped in conducting around 12,000 raids so far, he appealed to all the important and affected industries to come together on one platform and fight this menace.

He said recently Sony Playstation joined hands with IMI and was working together to ensure a crackdown on the gaming pirates.

''To fight the menace effectively we need an active support from all the law enforcement agencies,'' he added.

The IMI is a consortium of over 75 music companies, including several prominent regional and national ones such as SAREGAMA, Universal Music, Tips, Venus, BMG Crescendo, Sangeetha, Sony Music, Virgin, Aditya Music etc representing over 75 per cent of the output in legitimate recordings and a wide range of musical repertoire.