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Taiwan dropped from IFPI's piracy watch list

After a year-long crackdown on commercial piracy, the nation has successfully had its name removed from the IFPI's watch list of 10 countries with high piracy rates, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) said yesterday.

The IPO quoted this year's IFPI business piracy report as saying that Taiwan was no longer among the 31 countries that the IFPI found to have larger domestic sales of pirated music CDs than of genuine copies last year.

The IFPI represents the recording industry worldwide with over 1,450 members in 75 countries and affiliated industry associations in 48 countries.

One-third of the music CDs sold in markets around the world last year were pirated copies, representing 1.2 billion copies at a total value of US$4.6 billion -- a figure which does not include illegal downloading from the Internet, according to the IFPI report.

Besides Taiwan, Canada and South Korea were also taken off the list due to their improved piracy situation.

Meanwhile, in the latest assessment by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a coalition of associations representing US copyright-based industries, the nation saw losses of some US$320.4 million in the recording business due to piracy over the past year, for a drop of 31 percent from the previous year's figure.

The IIPA also assessed that the nation's movie piracy rate decreased from the 44 percent registered in 2003 to 40 percent last year, while the music piracy rate dropped from 42 percent to 36 percent, according to the IPO.
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