Online copyright infringement remains a persistent issue for recording industries in the U.S. and abroad, an international trade group representing them said in a new report.
A survey of music consumers in 18 countries found that 38 percent of respondents acknowledged obtaining songs by committing copyright infringement, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) wrote in the report published Tuesday, with a significant percentage of online pirates admittedly stealing freely available music.
Stream ripping — a term for making digital copies of material shared on streaming services, such as YouTube, Apple Music or Spotify — is the most dominant method for committing copyright infringement, IFPI said in its Music Consumer Insight Report 2018.
While recording industries have shifted toward making music available on streaming platforms, including through both subscription-based and free, ad-supported services, nearly a third of consumers admittedly rip music from either so they can listen offline, the report said.
Thirty-two percent of respondents admitted using either stream ripping sites or software to make unauthorized copies, and 23 percent said they downloaded unauthorized copies from either online “cyberlockers” or by using peer-to-peer file-sharing applications, according to the report.
Seventeen percent of respondents admitted committing copyright infringement by using search engines like Google to find material, the report said.
“Music piracy has disappeared from the media in the past few years but it certainly hasn’t gone away,” said David Price, director of insight and analysis at IFPI. “People still like free stuff, so it doesn’t surprise us that there are a lot of people engaged in this. And it’s relatively easy to pirate music, which is a difficult thing for us to say,” he told The Guardian.
Eighty-six percent of all consumers use on-demand streaming services, the report also concluded, with most of those — 52 percent — relying on video streaming sites like YouTube in particular.
Twenty-eight percent of global streamers have paid subscriptions, and 20 percent use free, ad-supported streaming sites, the report said.
Founded in 1933, the IFPI represents roughly 1,300 major and independent companies in 59 countries. Its report is based on polling of thousands of music consumers between the ages of 16 and 64 in 18 of the world’s largest music markets, including the United States.
The group’s previous insight report, published in Sept. 2017, similarly found that 40 percent of consumers commit copyright infringement, including 35 percent who use stream-ripping sites and services.
The Trump administration subsequently raised concerns about stream-ripping in April when it referenced the intellectual property repercussions in an annual report issued by the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative.
Stream ripping causes “substantial economic harm to music creators and undermining legitimate online services,” the Trump administration concluded in the report.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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