SOPA Opponents Nothing Short of ‘Hysterical,’ IFPI Chief Says
LONDON -- Opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) has been nothing short of “hysterical,” said Frances Moore, CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the recording industry trade group, at a media briefing Monday to announce release of the group’s annual Digital Music Report. SOPA and PIPA opponents “constantly say ‘no, no, no,’ without more helpfully saying what they would support,” Moore said. “It’s always just ‘no.'"
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It’s not a question of whether, but when, SOPA and PIPA will re-emerge “in some form, with compromises,” Moore said. “I have no idea what the compromises will look like. But these bills are not going away. The hysterical opposition has given us all pause for thought."
The global heads of Sony Music and Universal Music were on hand at the briefing to say they actually draw optimism from the SOPA and PIPA opposition. “It’s a good thing,” Edgar Berger, CEO, International, at Sony Music Entertainment, said of the bills’ detractors. “Publicity for the opposition has bred discussion on the principle of ownership. We see the Internet as a blessing. It’s open 24/7, with easy access and no limits on shelf space.” Rob Wells, president of Universal Music’s Global Digital Business, said: “It’s been on the front pages, which is a good thing. … It’s flushed out the resistance. Now we know the scale of what we are up against."
Moore thinks payment providers and British police, among others, deserve “hats off” for helping IFPI, in a campaign that began last March, prevent 62 Web sites, most from Russia and the Ukraine, “from abusing payment services for pirate material,” she said. “But the search engines such as Google could do much more. Google has boasted about spending $60 million on fighting piracy, which is not much when you know that at least a quarter of all access to illegal sites is via search engines. Google could, for instance, stop adverts on illegal sites. The ’see no evil’ attitude can’t last. Google has a duty of diligence."
IFPI and its anti-piracy investigators “are capped on the number of enquiries about illegal site searches we make, to 100,000 queries a day,” Moore said. “That’s nowhere near enough. We need more.” Moore thinks “good faith is lacking” at Google, she said. “What can we do? Well, I would rather talk of partnership on cleaning up the Net. So far Google’s moves into legitimate music store sales have been symbolic, but that will change, and then we can work together.” Google didn’t immediately comment.
As for IFPI’s digital music report, “major international music services” are operating in 58 countries, compared with only 23 in January a year ago, the report said. That helped push 2011 global digital music sales to an 8 percent increase from a year earlier to $5.2 billion, IFPI said. It cited an 11 percent increase in single-track downloads and a 24 percent jump in digital album downloads. Moreover, the number of users paying to subscribe to a music service jumped by 65 percent in 2011 to 13.4 million worldwide, it said.
Meanwhile, “momentum is building in the fight against piracy as governments and a growing circle of intermediaries engage with our industry,” the report said. Still, piracy “remains an enormous barrier to sustainable growth in digital music,” it said. Citing IFPI and Nielsen data, the group estimated that globally, one in four Internet users “regularly access unlicensed services.” Such activity is “rigging the market for legitimate services, stunting growth and jeopardising investment in music,” it said. “IFPI advocates an inclusive combination of graduated response, site-blocking and other measures to tackle the problem.”