Pirate CD sales top 1 billion copies, 40% of sold CDs is pirated

July 10, 2003

CNN reports that pirate
CD sales are currently exceeding 1 billion copies a year. Also the total pirate music market is worth an estimated $4.6 billion last
year, up 7 percent from 2001 and global music sales tumbled 7.2 percent to
$32.2 billion in 2002. Reasons are said to be the availability of pirated CDs,
especially in countries with low incomes, and downloading of pirated
music.

The IFPI
listed China, Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, Poland, Russia, Spain, Taiwan,
Thailand and Ukraine as the top 10 problem countries where local piracy
laws remain weak and piracy rates are high. Russia has overtaken the
Ukraine to become Europe's biggest producer of pirate CDs.

In a country where the average wage is still
just $140 and roughly a quarter of households live below the poverty line,
officials have little hope of selling copyright CDs which cost about $15.
A pirated CD costs about $4.

More and more people are now downloading
music from the Internet and burning CDs. The industry has threatened to
sue hundreds of individual computer users who illegally share music files
on line.

Seizures of private music discs increased by 37
million in 2002 . Fifty million pirate discs were seized, split equally between
illegally produced pressed music CDs and illegal copies made on CD-R. Read
more on CNN.com

Source: CNN.com