A Rationale on Filipino Music Anti Piracy

            The Philippines is a music-loving country. We have composers and singers who have brought honors to our country by winning in international competitions.  It has contributed financially (and still does so) to our presently struggling music industry   if properly encouraged and supported by the government with appropriate legislation against anti-piracy.

            The music industry in our country used to be a P2 billion thriving industry before music piracy sabotaged it to near collapse beginning in the year 2000. Aside from bringing pride to our country through our numerous talented singers and composers, this industry also has contributed economically by providing thousands of jobs within the record companies (such as promo girls, sales girls, delivery boys, and drivers as well as in allied industries like record bars, radio and TV stations, recording studios, concert venues, production staffs, costume providers, printing companies, disco and video bars, etc.), given financial support to government by way of paying millions of pesos in various taxes., brought joy to the buying public and masses, provided various and numerous opportunities in the field of music through the discovery of  our many talented singers, musicians, and composers.

           If only the government and the public can support anti-piracy projects and the Philippine music industry as a whole, it won’t be long before we can produce talents like the Beatles of England and the Abba of Sweden who helped prop the economy of their country with billions of dollars in the form of royalties received from the users of their songs in other countries.          

          Most people don’t seem to believe that the Filipinos can, and it is this collective apathy that forms the root cause of the problem.

            Several leading executives from the major record labels believe that the music industry in our country right now is not good. They predicted that the Philippine Music Industry can die in the next few years due to music piracy.

            To give you further details about it, there are far less OPM albums being released every year. Even the quota to reach platinum and gold label has decreased. This is because in general, Filipinos do not seem to want to buy legitimate albums by Filipino artists, a sad and strange truth.

            For one, many people think that CDs are too expensive for the average Pinoy to afford (each CD now only costs P35 per piece and even 3 CDs for P100). Also, they could be found anywhere, from side streets, to tiangges, even in some malls. But this does not make the act of buying pirated music recordings legitimate. It is still morally and ethically wrong and is leading to the death of the local entertainment industry, as we know it.

            Most of the illegal CD factories in the country are owned and operated by foreign nationals (Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian, etc.) who escaped the authorities in their country and have since set up shop in ours. They smuggle everything into the country, not paying any taxes, depriving the government of much needed income.

            These CD pirates are part of a worldwide syndicate operating in over 40 countries. They are well-organized, hi-tech, sophisticated and very well funded.

            There is a lobby group for the global music industry in London that branded our country as one of the countries in South East Asia that manufactures pirated music for global supply. How sad.

            Why is this so? Why has piracy suddenly become so big that legitimate industries are on the verge of collapse?

            Furthermore, law enforcement is hindered by the fact that they are hesitant to confiscate pirated CDs by themselves since they are not fully aware which are pirated and which are not; they could not simply arrest the sales people while the real perpetrators/owners escape; most of the sellers are Moros and Muslims who are armed and do fight back; search warrants are tedious to secure; a lot of our prosecutors are not knowledgeable enough about the copyright law.