U.S. Is Only the Tip of Pirated Music Iceberg

U.S. Is Only the Tip of Pirated Music Iceberg
By MARK LANDLER

Published: September 26, 2003

RUSSELS, Sept. 25 — Hang around any schoolyard in Germany or college campus in Indonesia and it becomes clear that the recording industry’s problems with the illegal online distribution of music in the United States pale beside the rampant piracy that goes on overseas.

From factories in Taiwan and Eastern Europe that churn out counterfeit CD’s to teenagers in Scandinavia and Singapore who download songs from the Internet and “burn” them on to blank discs, the line between legitimate and pirated music has all but vanished in many countries.

Music executives abroad are scrutinizing the American industry’s legal campaign against people who share files on the Internet. But many doubt such tactics would work in their countries, given the relative weakness of laws protecting copyrights and the ubiquity of the activity. “People in their 60’s are burning CD’s at home,” said Gerd Gebhardt, the chairman of the German Phonographic Industry Association. “Housewives, who should be cooking, are burning. It’s not like we can go after 80-year-old men or 12-year-old kids. We have to find the right approach.”

Mr. Gebhardt hopes the German music industry will bring its first lawsuit against a file sharer in a few months. In the meantime, it is trying to win back the public through sympathy rather than subpoenas.

In August, the German labels started a Web site that preaches the evils of file sharing. They are also working to create legal online distribution services in Europe to rival the unauthorized file swappers, though progress has been slowed by the demands of the copyright agencies.

The industry’s biggest hurdle may be cultural. As is the case among many young people in the United States, swapping files and burning tracks on CD’s are viewed in most countries as routine, not renegade, behavior. After all, the most popular file-sharing software, KaZaA, was dreamed up by a Swede and written by three young Estonians.

“I don’t feel like I’m infringing on the artists,” said Mike, a 26-year-old business student in Berlin, who says he has burned 700 to 800 CD’s, many with downloaded songs for himself and his friends.

“Whether Robbie Williams makes 15 million or 12 million a year doesn’t matter to me, honestly speaking,” he said, referring to the British pop star whose songs are actively swapped over the Internet.

Despite his claims of innocence, Mike agreed to talk only if his last name was not published. Germany, he noted, recently adopted a new copyright law, which tightens the rules against downloading music. He is also unnerved by the lawsuits against 261 file sharers in the United States.

Piracy, of course, affects more than a pop star’s paycheck. Sales of recorded music have plunged more steeply in several European and Asian countries than in the United States because of a combination of file sharing, home CD burning and the mass production of knock-off disks. In Germany, Europe’s largest and hardest-hit market, sales have fallen by a third in the last five years. They are projected to decline another 20 percent this year, compared with a 12 percent first-half decline in the United States.

A survey by the market research concern GfK estimates that Germans bought 500 million blank CD’s last year. That compares with sales of 160 million prerecorded CD’s. (In the United States, about 1.8 billion blank CD’s were sold last year versus 800 million recorded CD’s.)

“If you walk into an electronics store in Frankfurt, you’ve got to jump over the stacks of CD burners to get to the prerecorded CD’s,” said Rick Dobbis, the president of Sony Music International.

These examples leave out China, where piracy exists on an entirely different scale. Nine out of 10 recordings in China are pirated, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an umbrella group for 46 national industry organizations.

Because of China’s vast size and a deeply rooted culture of counterfeiting, the music industry tends to put the country in its own category when it comes to combating piracy overseas.

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