Italy, France, China, Spain and Brazil are leading havens for online game piracy according to a “Special 301” report filed with the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA). The U.S. copyright-based industries that comprise the IIPA asked the USTR for assistance in remedying legal and enforcement deficiencies in these countries and 35 other trading partners.
The IIPA proposed that 33 of these countries be placed on USTR’s list of countries that fail to adequately or effectively protect intellectual property rights or provide creators with adequate market access. Under the “Special 301” trade law, the USTR can impose trade sanctions on certain countries following an investigation and consultation period.
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), a member of IIPA, points to extraordinarily high levels of online piracy occurring through the use of popular peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols by subscribers in Italy, China, Spain, Brazil and France. Infringing peer-to-peer sharing of game files in those countries amounted to 54% of this activity observed worldwide during 2010, according to ESA.
“Entertainment software piracy is facilitated by the widespread availability of circumvention devices, technologies and services that enable the use of illegally copied games on home consoles and handheld platforms,” states the ESA.
“Our industry continues to grow in the U.S., but epidemic levels of online piracy stunt sales and growth in a number of countries, including Italy, China, Spain, Brazil and France, where we see crushing volumes of infringing peer-to-peer activity involving leading game titles,” said Michael D. Gallagher, president and CEO of the ESA, which represents U.S. computer and video game publishers.
“Game publishers lose opportunities for export sales, and the U.S. loses opportunities to expand our export economy, and consumers in those countries lose local benefits of having a thriving game market,” said Gallagher.
U.S. computer and video game sales generated US$24 billion in 2010, including an estimated US$5.1 billion from software downloads and online subscription charges, according to NPD. These figures do not include several billions more in export sales. The entertainment software industry directly accounts for more than 80,000 American jobs.
Other notable aspects of the report were the results of studies performed by the ESA that revealed alarmingly high volumes of unauthorized copying of game titles across the leading P2P platforms. Results are summarized as follows:
• Overall Volume: During CY 2010, ESA vendors detected more than 144 million connections by peers participating in unauthorized file-sharing of select ESA member titles on P2P networks through Internet Service Providers across more than 200 countries and territories globally.
• Leading Countries: Together the top 5 countries (Italy, China, Spain, Brazil and France) accounted for more than 78 million detections — more than 14 times the number of detections attributable to subscribers in the United States (approximately 5.6 million).
These results are based on connection activity involving approximately 230 of ESA members’ leading game titles on major public P2P networks. The data is broken down, by country, based on the country of operation of the ISP. These figures do not account for copies that are downloaded directly from hosted content, including illegal game files found on “one-click” hosting sites, such as rapidshare.com, which appear to account each year for progressively greater volumes of infringing downloads.
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