Taiwan’s music-download business has been dominated for several years by two peer-to-peer file swapping services, EzPeer and Kuro. But a legal battle being waged against the two services by the recording industry is heating up as legitimate music download services prepare for launch here in the coming months.
EzPeer and Kuro offer users unlimited downloads of MP3 files for $3.28 and $2.89 per month respectively. With hundreds of thousands of users for each service, their combined revenue is expected to hit $31 million this year, says Robin Lee, secretary general of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Members’ Foundation in Taiwan, which represents the interests of major record labels and has filed copyright infringement lawsuits against both services.
Because EzPeer and Kuro don’t have licensing agreements with the music labels providing the content, the services are considered illegitimate. Their success has badly hurt the recording industry, according to Lee, helping to drive down legitimate recording industry revenues by more than half, to $157 million in 2002.
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