May 9, 2003
"Illegal downloads of mobile ringtones costs music industry '$ 1million per day'"
Searching for ringtone news this morning, I fell on this article published a year ago by Envisional, a company which offers Intellectual Property protection and monitoring solutions. It's basically a warning that another Napster is in the making, as the craze for downloading musical ringtones to mobile phones has created massive intellectual property abuses that have the potential to cost the music industry as much as $1 million dollars per day.
The articles gives interesting insight into this market:
"Envisional identified hundreds of sites on the Internet that make ringtones available for download to mobile phones. While most sites charge users for each tune they download (£1.50 per tone), Forrester analyst Korsten Schmidt, a Dutch industry analyst who has been investigating the ringtone phenomenon, says very few of these companies ever return any royalties to the record companies who own the copyright to the tunes.
The record companies are entitled to a fee of 7.5 US cents for every tune downloaded meaning that, with hundreds of sites allowing hundreds of thousands of ringtones to be downloaded every day, the music industry is suffering massive losses due to copyright abuse".
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