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Top piracy sites enjoyed 53 billion visits last year

By | Published on Thursday 13 January 2011

Piracy

A new report by MarkMonitor, an American agency that tackles fraudulent activity online, reckons that the world’s top 22 piracy websites received more than 53 billion visits globally last year. Which is quite a lot when you consider the world’s population is currently under 7 billion, so on average every single person on the planet visited at least one such site at least seven times, or something like that.

The “piracy websites” investigated by MarkMonitor include those that sell counterfeit goods, including fashion, luxury goods and prescription drugs, as well as those that provide access to unlicensed music, movie or TV content, either to stream or download. Among the latter lot were RapidShare, MegaVideo and MegaUpload. It was the digital content sites that generated the vast majority of the 53 billion visits, with the counterfeit goods sites receiving less than 100 million hits over all.

Commenting on the new report, the Senior Director Of Internet Counterfeiting & Piracy at the Global Intellectual Property Center in the US remarked yesterday: “Online intellectual property theft – whether it is the sale of counterfeit shoes and fake drugs or the illegal distribution of movies, music, and software – steals jobs, threatens consumers, and hinders our economic growth. We have known for a long time that rogue websites, those dedicated to piracy and counterfeiting, were flourishing at our expense. Now we begin to see the staggering scope of this problem – more than 53 billion visits on rogue sites”.

It should be noted that the MarkMonitor survey only checked how many people visited the “piracy” sites and not the activities said people participated in when they got there.  Sites like RapidShare are sure to point out that their service has entirely legitimate uses too, so it’s unfair to assume that everytime someone hits their site it is to share or access unlicensed music or movie content.

And look, they’ve just done exactly that. Having been dubbed the biggest of all the piracy websites in terms of traffic by the MarkMonitor survey, a RapidShare spokesperson told CMU last night: “The report concludes that RapidShare has to be the biggest digital piracy site from looking at the number of page visits, totally ignoring the fact that millions of customers use the service for perfectly legitimate purposes. Private customers use RapidShare to share their personal pictures, videos and documents or to make backup copies of their hard drives. Business clients rely on our services to exchange large files with colleagues at different sites, with clients or with service providers or to make available free programmes or programme updates to its customers”.

Arguing that unlike, say, old P2P services like Kazaa and LimeWire, the legitimate uses of their service greatly outweigh the illegal uses, the Rapidshare spokesperson added: “In an interview with mediapost.com MarkMonitor’s VP Of Communications said that she did not consider websites like YouTube piracy sites as they ‘have procedures in place where brandowners can take down [copyright infringing] material’. RapidShare offers the exact same take-down features to copyright owners as YouTube does. So, where is the difference?”



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