London - October 22, 1998
Heads of the international recording industry today called on Britain to champion
its future in the digital era by pushing for strong new international copyright laws
and for tougher policing by governments against global piracy.
They asked for a crucial European Copyright Directive, aimed at allowing
record companies to trade music on-line and with new digital formats, to be
strengthened as it passes through the European Parliament in Strasbourg in
December. And they appealed to Britain to lead the campaign for strict new
legal controls on the CD manufacturing industry worldwide.
The delegation of record company heads paid tribute to UK policies promoting
the music industry and raised its future concerns with government during the
meeting in London of the board members of IFPI, the record industry's
international trade organization. IFPI represents more than 1300 record
producers and distributors in the $38 billion global record industry,
including the industry's six large record companies - BMG, EMI, PolyGram, Sony
Music, Universal and Warner Music.
The record industry delegation met in London with Trade and Industry Minister
Kim Howells (responsible for copyright) and the Minister responsible for music
at the Department of Culture, Janet Anderson. They urged Britain, whose record
industry earns the UK $2 billion in export revenue, to take on a bigger
international role in promoting the music industry worldwide at a time of
critical opportunities and threats posed by new digital technologies.
IFPI Director-General Nic Garnett said: "The British music industry is a
tremendous economic success story, and the British government is an
enlightened supporter of its domestic industry. We now look for Britain to
take on a more international role, to shape laws to unlock the huge economic
potential for music in the age of the Internet, and to fight the growing
threat of digital piracy. We also want Britain to lead the fight against
pirate CD manufacturing, which costs the music industry $5 billion a year.
New copyright legislation now being considered by the European Parliament will
have a huge impact on the livelihoods of British artists, composers and record
companies. And CD piracy, from Shanghai to Sao Paulo, from Moscow to Macau,
erodes British exports and costs British jobs. This is a time for Britain to
fight internationally to sustain the great success it has achieved for its
music industry at home."
What next in the fight against CD Piracy? Plant licensing controls.
Specifically, IFPI is calling for the EU to exert greater political and trade
pressure on countries with high levels of pirate CD manufacturing. One year
ago, faced with a dramatic rise of CD piracy, IFPI launched a new "zero
tolerance" strategy, recruiting a team of international police specialists and
investigators to target the problem at source in the manufacturing plant. The
strategy has had notable successes in Hong Kong and parts of eastern Europe,
where tens of millions of pirate CDs have been taken off the market.
New plant licensing laws, introduced in early 1998, led to this success. Those
laws need extending worldwide, and particularly to a number of Asian, east
European and Latin American countries where rapidly-increasing CD production,
much of it suspected as illegal, remains unregulated. The new controls consist
of: registration of all plants; compulsory use of the Source Identification
(SE) Code at all plants; and regulation of the import of plant and raw
materials.
Introducing the new controls should be a top priority in the forthcoming EU
policy review of anti-piracy enforcement in Europe's internal market. The
Commission will be producing a Green Paper on piracy and enforcement by the
end of the year. Laws for the music industry to embrace on-line distribution
and new formats are outlined in The WIPO Treaties and the EU Copyright Directive.
The recording industry pioneered the first digital format, the CD, in the
1980s. The industry now wants to take up the huge potential benefits of the
information society, and to distribute music by new electronic transmission
new digital formats. Electronic distribution of music is in its infancy but
likely to develop very quickly. In the last 18 months all the leading record
companies have established web-sites for promotional and commercial
distribution of records. Some are already experimenting with direct digital
distribution, such as a trial agreement in Germany for on-line distribution
between record companies and Deutsche Telekom.
However, a legitimate on-line marketplace for the sale of music cannot exist
without adequate copyright laws built into it. The UK should push for Europe
urgently to enact such laws.
The EU Copyright Directive will implement two 1996 international copyright
protection (WIPO) Treaties that were earlier this month passed into US law.
The recording industry is pressing for the following changes when the
Directive goes to the European Parliament in a crucial vote scheduled for
December.
The music industry needs exclusive rights to control the use of its content
over new transmission services (such as multi-channel broadcasting) that will
be an important distribution outlet for its music in the future Digital
"private" copying, the equivalent of a retail sale - cannot be exempted from
copyright protection.
Loopholes allowing so-called "temporary copying" are an invitation to interact
pirates and need closing. Record companies need proper legal rights to use
technologies such as watermarking and encryption. They need protection from
hacking equipment that could circumvent those technologies.