India’s Fight Against Piracy Continues

There are many supposed solutions for piracy but none have been  effective so far. The media industry is losing millions of dollars due to piracy and content producers are not happy about it. Some take matters into their own hands. Some have gone through the legal route. Some have complained and waited. Looks like the solution is somewhere in between.

Two news stories which popped up in my aggregators make a curious tone when put together. 104 sites were banned a few months back for serving pirated content. One of these banned sites, smashits.com is now seeking licenses for the music it serves. The music industry might have found one additional, albeit smaller, source of revenue.

1 in 104 – Not a bad proposition.

Another story posted by Medianama reports that Anna Bond mp3 results were removed from Google’s searches following a DMCA complaint from Anand Audio. As many as 80 links were removed.

Both the stories have positives to talk about. One involved going all the way through to the legal proceedings. Another involved a simple request to the search engine. There might be solace for the media industry between legal proceedings, DMCA complaints and selling music online through services like Flyte of Flipkart.

Now don’t think that this will be the end of piracy. Far from it. When Songs.pk was banned, it sprouted up again as songspk.pk. Bringing up a website with content can be done in less than an hour but bringing up a court order against a website could take eternity.

Megaupload’s bust had scared quite a few online sites who said they were shutting down voluntarily. My guess is quite a few have popped up too. That’s really how it works.

To draw an analogy, controlling online piracy is like trying to put an army of frogs into a basket. When you have figured out a way to put three in the basket, two frogs pop out and it goes on. Piracy is no different.

Via

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