Face the music for piracy on mobile

Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, September 20, 2007
IF YOUR cellphone memory card is full with illegally downloaded songs, courtesy your local mobile phone store, then both you and the shop owner will now be branded as music pirates and might end up behind bars.
India has become the first country in the world to crack the whip on music piracy through illegal downloading of songs in mobile phones. The Indian Music Industry (IMI), a non-profit organisation whose members includes major record companies like Saregama India Ltd. (HMV), Universal Music (India), Tips, Virgin Records, and several other prominent national and regional labels, will now train the Kolkata Police to nab the shop owners who charge customers and illegally download songs on their mobile phone’s memory cards.
The annual loss incurred by the government, telephone service providers and the copyright holder due to this malpractice is more than Rs 150 crore. “Music piracy through mobile phone is a little demon but if not nipped in the bud it will grow out of proportion. Instead of catching people using memory chips filled with illegal downloads it will be easy to nab such shopkeepers who provide the service. Therefore, we are training our people who will in turn train sub-inspectors in Kolkata on how to catch such shopkeepers and collect evidence against them,” said IMI general secretary Savio Desuza.
Post-training the police will use a special software to know if a particular computer has illegally downloaded MP3 files. “The police will now know how to detect music pirates and collect evidence against them. It’s a highly technical job, but once the crime is proved the accused can be fined between Rs 50,000 and Rs 2 lakh and face upto two years’ imprisonment,” Desuza added.
Out of 159 million mobile phone users in the country a good number of people are now using sets with memory cards to store songs and other data. If songs are downloaded from service providers then all the associated parties share the revenue. But several mobile phone stores illegally download and transfer more than 200 songs on memory cards for as low as Rs 50-100.
Apart from equipping the police with requisite training to catch such music pirates, the IMI is sending letters to mobile phone companies to make their dealers stay away from such illegal activities.
Transferring songs and ring tones from one mobile to another via blue tooth and infrared also amounts to music piracy. “Mostly youngsters do this and they are unaware how the music industry loses out on crores of revenue for such illegal data transfer. We are also talking to mobile phone companies to tackle the problem,” Desuza added.
India is among the top 10 countries affected by music piracy and loses nearly Rs 450 crore to pirated music.
Mou.Chakraborty@hindustantimes.com