Brazil, China, Italy and Spain are the “leading havens”...

Property Alliance (IIPA). ESA is a member of IIPA, which proposed that 33 countries be placed on USTR’s list of countries that are failing to adequately or effectively protect intellectual property rights or provide creators with adequate market access. ESA pointed to “extraordinarily high levels of online piracy occurring through the use of popular peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols by subscribers in” the four countries called leading game piracy havens, along with France. Infringing peer-to-peer sharing of game files in those countries accounted for 54 percent of the piracy activity observed globally in 2010, ESA said. The game industry “continues to grow in the U.S., but epidemic levels of online piracy stunt sales and growth in” many other countries, said ESA President Michael Gallagher. ESA is seeing “crushing volumes of infringing peer-to-peer activity involving leading game titles,” he said. As a result, publishers “lose opportunities for export sales, and the U.S. loses opportunities to expand our export economy, and consumers in those countries lose local benefits of having a thriving game market,” he said. ESA joined with other IIPA members in recommending that Spain be elevated to USTR’s Priority Watch List and that “meaningful actions be taken to stem the tide of piracy which threatens Spain’s creative industries,” ESA said. It was also recommended that Italy remain on the Special 301 Watch List, “due in large part to extraordinarily high levels of online piracy,” ESA said. ESA vendors last year “detected more than 30 million connections by peers participating in unauthorized file sharing of select member titles on P2P networks through Italian ISPs, placing Italy number one in overall volume of detections in the world, as well as number one in detections per capita and detections per Internet user,” it said. IIPA recommended that Brazil remain on the Watch List, while Canada remain on the Priority Watch List pending passage of copyright improvements and border enforcement reforms, ESA said. ESA joined IIPA in recommending that China remain on the Priority Watch List because it “remains the source of much of the world’s supply of counterfeit games and game hardware and circumvention devices,” ESA said.