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Piracy Taking On In The Mobile Ringtone Industry
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Home > Piracy Taking On In The Mobile Ringtone Industry
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The growing piracy in the music industry is affecting the positive business of the mobile ringtone segment. The extensive chartbusting music downloads is now bringing in plenty of mullah for mobile service providers. The industry is facing lots of problems in terms of illegitimate downloads of musical ringtones as well as under-reporting at different levels amongst the content providers, aggregators, operators and mobile phone dealers.
The menace is growing massively, with no immediate solution to have found yet by the concerned authorities. There has been no forgery found in the telecom industry though, which has been making legitimate payments for the music offered in terms of ringtones and caller tunes for their mobile phones. But recently, some amount of piracy was again traced into the telecom business, which is expected to grow further, unless remedial measures are taken immediately. Many retail shops are also found selling high-end phones with all accessories as against law and violation of copyrights, since they are selling them off without seeking any prior permission or paying royalty fees. Mobile operators deny any such practices happening on their parts. As per the mobile service providers, they are far from indulging into any illegal downloads of music from their servers, as they maintain an updated account for billing purposes. Nevertheless, they are not confirmed if the same level of legitimacy is followed amongst various levels of content providers, aggregators and mobile phone dealers.
Then there is a concept called ‘Forward lock’ wherein you will be charged the royalty fee for downloading a ringtone for the first time. Later it can be forwarded to another user free of charge, thus adding value to the ongoing piracy. Some mobile operators are planning to device a method though which the illegal means of transferring ringtones from one user to another can be locked or stopped.
Many mobile retailers are also creeping into piracy of ringtones by offering ringtones along with the phone to the users without paying the royalty fees. A few pre-load microchips have also spread inside the market.
In the case of under-reporting, numerous downloading of music or ringtones have been under-reported. Instead of the music providers, the royalties paid by the users for downloading music is actually being enjoyed by companies called aggregators. This may even include Yahoo and India times. These aggregators tend to convert songs into digital forms that can be played on mobile phones and then sell them off to the mobile phone users for a fee. Thereafter, they handover the royalties to the music companies and the performing rights society for distribution purposes. In India, mobile operators are reported to have collecting major chunk of revenue share amounting to 50-60 percent through downloading of music, as compared to other countries, where the mobile operators reserve only 10 percent of the total revenue as their market shares. While the music in Indian telecom industry alone accounts for share worth INR 150 crores in the market.
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