IFPI, the worldwide roof organization of music industry, has published its
annual piracy report. In the report, the organization estimates that close to 20 billion songs were illegally downloaded during last year. The count contains anything that did not bring money to IFPI from allofmp3.com sales to p2p downloads. P2P is blamed in the usual fashion. The report mentions separately the closing of Grokster, the trial on Kazaa and the closing of Razorback. Action against Pirate Bay is mentioned as well but its results not evaluated, for understandable reasons. FTP, IRC, LANs, digital stream ripping and bluetooth abilities of mobile telephones are all listed as tools of piracy.
The list of worst piracy countries contains Brazil, Canada, China, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Russia and Spain. Curiously Sweden is missing from the list, despite having the world's biggest bittorrent tracker and 10 % of its population as filesharers. This might have something to do with Sweden also having the world's most advanced political piracy movement and a parliamentary election just seven weeks away.
If you enjoy industrial propaganda, this is recommended reading. There are nice graphics too.
