Taipei Times: How much is P2P and Internet piracy hurting the music industry in Taiwan?
Robin Lee (
Meanwhile, the problem of piracy in night markets has also been decreasing. This year, the number of vendors of pirated music products in the whole of Taiwan is now only 50, according to our survey for the first half of this year. Last year it was 300. This is due in part to the government's special [anti-piracy] task force but also because Internet piracy has expanded. Internet piracy is more attractive than night markets.
Kuro says they have 500,000 users who pay NT$99 per month. That means their income is around NT$600 million per year. Ezpeer charges NT$100 per month with 300,000 members. That means Ezpeer has NT$360 million in income. They have NT$960 million in total. The legal physical market is only NT$4.9 billion, but only two Internet P2P sites can earn NT$1 billion. You can see how big this market is and how much we are losing.
TT: The P2P community claims that the music industry is behind the times and wants to keep the physical market -- compact disks -- as the primary channel for selling music with the Internet as secondary. How do you respond to that?
Lee: This is not true. We are not fighting against new technology. What we are against is people using technology to hurt copyright owners. For example, music formats keep on changing, and we were among the first to move from the LP to the cassette to the CD to the VCD and DVD, and in the near future CDi.
You can run your business with leading technology, but you need to get permission or authorization from the copyright owner. And it's not just happening in music, it's also happening to motion pictures, books, software and computer games. The Internet market cannot replace the physical market, but the Internet is a new commercial way of distributing music. We are trying to co-operate with new technology.
TT: How are you trying to do that, since you have rejected Kuro's offer to collect an extra NT$50 on top of their NT$99 monthly fee and pass that money directly to the music industry as a kind of royalty fee?
Lee: Kuro and EzPeer are not the only two Internet business models. Now there are seven Internet companies negotiating with the music industry. They are all trying to cooperate with the record industry to create a new way of e-commerce, via download MP3, or streaming files. [Apple Computer Inc's music download site] iTunes is acceptable as each tune pays a royalty. We [the IFPI] are not a business, and we do not negotiate business terms -- we focus on copyright protection.
We set out three conditions.
First, get legal permission. If you want to use our music in your system, you need to get our permis-sion. Second, you need effective control which means that you can only use the titles authorized by the record companies and must stop users sharing the titles you do not have the right to use. Third, you must have transparent reporting, which means you need to let me know how many times my titles have been downloaded or exchanged in the last month, or last two weeks, so that we can calculate the royalty and then how to share the income.
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