US music group wants OPM site taken down

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has complained before the US government of a Philippine-based music download site, which the group claims is a “notorious” piracy hotspot.

Alongside a number of peer-to-peer (P2P), BitTorrent indexing sites, cyberlockers as well as non-P2P download and forum websites, RIAA identified The Digital Pinoy (www.thedigitalpinoy.org) as among the notorious digital piracy markets worldwide.

The Digital Pinoy is “the most notorious forum site in the Philippines which is dedicated to infringing original Pilipino music (OPM),” RIAA said in an Oct. 24 submission to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), which is conducting an out-of-cycle review of notorious piracy markets.

“Only registered members can access the content on [The Digital Pinoy]. The site currently has around 117,000 registered members who can download OPM via the illegal links posted on the forum. Members need to have points in their account to download music. Members can earn points while responding to a post or submitting download links or lyrics in the forum. Large amounts of music can be downloaded from the ‘OPM Download’ section,” RIAA noted.

The US recording industry lobby also reported that The Digital Pinoy “provides detailed instructions to their members on how to upload files to some foreign famous cyberlockers (e.g. zenfile.com, mediafile.com, filefactory.com, megashare.com, gigasize.com) and how to obtain the download link, in order to post it to the forum.”

RIAA lamented that while takedown notices had already been sent to The Digital Pinoy, only a few downloads were removed.

According to RIAA, much of the potential revenues of the global recording industry had been lost due to “unfair competition resulting from services making music available without having obtained the license to do so.”

“We remain exceedingly hopeful that societies will cease to tolerate the operation of sites that prey on current weaknesses of law or enforcement, and that legitimate enterprises will act in ways to deny such sites the opportunity to generate revenue from the illicit activities,” RIAA said.

The USTR regularly conducts an out-of-cycle review of notorious piracy markets besides its annual Special 301 Report, which assesses intellectual property rights protection in US trading partners.

In 2012, the USTR removed Quiapo in Manila from its list of notorious physical piracy hotspots as “the Philippine government has taken significant enforcement actions that have reduced the number of counterfeit and pirated goods available for sale” in the area.

Last April, the USTR also removed the Philippines from the Special 301 Watch List after two decades of being deemed as a piracy hotspot.

The USTR said that the Philippine government had “enacted a series of significant legislative and regulatory reforms to enhance the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in the Philippines” as well as “made laudable civil and administrative enforcement gains.”