Major international record labels unite to fight pirates

The Russian offices of Universal Music, Sony Music and other music production companies are setting up an alliance to fight Internet music pirates in Russia.

The non-commercial partnership, which also includes online music sellers, is currently completing its registration, Vedomosti business daily wrote Thursday.

Its main objective is to fight pirates and promote the copyright owners’ rights, the director general of Universal Music Russia, Dmitry Kononov, said.

The alliance will look up pirate websites and report them to law-enforcement agencies, who are expected to shut them down.

Apart from leading an open war on pirates, the alliance wants to try and persuade them to shift to legal operations, such as replacing downloads with streaming files, or allow mp3 files to be downloaded only after showing advertisements first.

Both online and offline media piracy flourish in Russia.

In 2007, the closure of the Allofmp3.com pirate music website was singled out as a non-negotiable condition of Russia’s entry to the World Trade Organization. The site was quietly closed after that, but hundreds of other sites are still there.