Once a year the music industry identifies the worst-of-the-worst "notorious markets" both on and off line as part of the U.S. Trade Representative's Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review. "In fact, there are thousands of websites on the Internet that are dedicated to piracy," says this year's RIAA report, "with new ones appearing all the time and existing ones frequently changing their online location (whether domain or hosting environment or both) to avoid enforcement."
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Anti-piracy is often compared to the game of Whac-a-Mole because new challenges keep coming. This latest report documents how old threats have gone out of business since being identified in last year's report, but new versions of the same sites as well as copycats have sprung back onto the internet to take their place.
In the physical CD space, online retail has helped distribution for pirates in China making perfect counterfeits as well as Russian pirates making copies that an expert can detect are inferior. The report commends Amazon and Ebay for their anti-piracy cooperation, disrupting distribution of physical copies online.
The legal music marketplace on the internet is growing, which the organization describes as promising but fragile. We have to hope it is strong enough to continue growing, in spite of content pirates' evolving threats, and to give thanks for federal efforts to protect U.S. intellectual property.
