Copyright Law

Report: Italy is Top Country for Video Game Piracy

By soulxtc

Anti-P2P group claims the top 5 video game piracy countries are Italy (17.1%), Spain (15.1%), France (7.9%), Germany (6.9%), and Poland (6.1%), and that it sent out some 45million warning letters to people in over 100 countries.

The Entertainment Software Association, the trade association that represents the video game industry in the United States, has just released its annual report for fiscal year 2009, and in it are some surprising details of the battle its waging against illegal file-sharing.

For example, it’s anti-piracy dept. apparently sent some 45 million notices of copyright infringement of its members’ games over the past year to people in more than 100 countries worldwide.

“In FY 09, with the continued growth and expansion of broadband access to the Internet in markets across the globe, the ESA saw dramatic growth in the online piracy of member games as downloads climbed to new heights in a number of countries, including major Western European countries as well as some emerging markets,” reads the report. “The ESA?s anti-piracy program addressed this problem by shifting manpower and resources toward this priority. Still, the program continued its efforts against other priority targets such as online warez groups and local criminal syndicates involved in pirate game replication and distribution abroad, among other issue areas.”

As part of that effort it says that it’s important that it doesn’t allow piracy to be lost in the shuffle of other legislative concerns like climate change and healthcare, especially during the economic downturn. I suppose it’s trying to insinuate that illegal downloads equal lost sales and therefore negatively impact the economy.

The ESA claims that a “download study” it commissioned in December 2008 found that consumers downloaded nearly 6.5 million illegal copies of games across 223countries, regions or territories, and that figure “far exceeds those games? legitimate sales for that period.”

That may be so, but it’s non-sequitur for it implies 1 illegal download equals 1 lost sale. Many people in the world can’t afford the high price of video games and others may not have otherwise purchased a copy. It’s the same nonsense the RIAA and MPAA have repeated over the years.

“ESA?s monitoring of pirate activity on the Internet during FY 09 saw sizable increases in volume in many countries, particularly in Spain, Italy, France and Brazil (now ranking among the top five countries), with the greatest numbers of pirate game files found on P2P networks such as eDonkey and BitTorrent,” it continues.

The top 5 P2P video game piracy countries in the world in order are Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and lastly Poland. Who knew the Italians were such hardcore gamers?

It wants to step up the fight against P2P by targeting ISPs with voluntary and legislative proposals to get them to “address network misuse.”

So long as the ESA touts those bogus inflated figures it may just succeed.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on September 03, 2009 (boomark / email).