Digital piracy in Uruguay

By Pittaluga Abogados

Recently, uruguayan newspaper El País published an investigation about the digital piracy situation in the country, focalized on the music industry.

Unlike the majority of the world, compact discs sales in Uruguay maintain an uncommon stability, although they are slowly diminishing. For example, in 2012 the industry would be commercializing nearly 500 thousand compact discs, a very close number in comparison of previous years.

National Record companies, musicians and authors are reasonably pleased with the situation. Nevertheless, they are also cautious and obviously preparing for the future, acknowledging the reality will change sooner or later.

In the actual scenario, since 2011 most of the record companies send a package of information to the Uruguayan Disc Chamber (CUD) when a new national compact disc is released: name of the album, band, number of songs, name and length of songs, and authors and composers, among other things.

After that, the CUD is in charge of monitoring the web looking for illegal digital versions of those music songs. Once those music files are discovered, the CUD notifies the appropriate company, institution or individual person requesting the immediate elimination of the file.

While the system somewhat works, local musicians are looking for new ways of fighting digital piracy, and the best one is the legal commercialization of digital music. One of the alternatives is selling songs through mobile phones, but the price of downloading a song legally in a mobile phone is 4 dollars, while buying the entire compact disc in a cd house costs 11 dollars. Other possibility is reaching an agreement with the government, that could pay musicians for introducing their songs in the One Laptop Per Child program.

It´s valuable that different goals and projects are analyzed, but in order to face successfully the future problem, Uruguay will also need changes in its legalization, better education for consumers and more resources for musicians.