Piracy 'remains significant problem'

A new study has placed the UK second in the world in terms of illegal music downloads.

The data comes from a monitoring service called Musicmetric who shared their results with the BBC earlier this week, revealing that 40 million albums and cds had been illegally shared in the first half of 2012.  Manchester, Nottingham and Southampton are ranked as the top three UK cities for file-sharing.

The survey is the biggest analysis of its kind to be conducted, revealing that Ed Sheeran, Rizzle Kicks and Rihanna are the most pirated artists of 2012.

The UK ranked second only to the US whose downloads in the same period neared the 100,000,000 mark, with Italy, Canada and Brazil making up the rest of the top five.

Speaking to the BBC, Geoff Taylor of the British Phonographic Industry said the data shows “there are more illegal downloads than there are legal purchases...it compares to about 240 million tracks that were sold legally. A lot of people are getting very rich from stealing other peoples things.”

The Pirate Party UK’s Loz Kaye defended the figures. Kaye, who plans to run for MP in Manchester, said that most of the complaints are because the downloads render big industry players unnecessary: “We need to remove the barriers for actual artists to connect with their business and their fans.”

His comments come in the same week that publishers of German Pirate Party Member Julia Schramm’s book Click Me ordered a take-down notice when her book was being shared online. Schramm is a senior member of the party, and has previously labelled intellectual property ‘disgusting’.
 

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