United States legislators on Wednesday condemned the alarming levels of digital piracy in five countries, saying that their governments failed to crack down copyright violators and has allowed the continued proliferation of illegal materials on the Internet.
Among the Top 5 copyright violators were China, Canada, Mexico, Spain, and Russia, the US Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus said.
In its 2010 International Piracy Watch List, the commission cited the continued sharing, downloading and uploading of copyrighted materials by these countries on peer-to-peer file-sharing websites, causing major harm to the music, movie, and videogame industries for the past several years.
According to the caucus report, the countries have failed the international community and have “greatly disappoint” by failing to make meaningful assessment of the overall status of the piracy in their countries.
The 70 members of the House of Representative have unanimously agreed on the findings, saying that last year was one of the worst times for the music and movie industries after these countries failed to protect copyrighted works from being shared illegally over P2P networks.
“Billions and billions of dollars have been lost and we continued to lose more because of inaction by these countries. They are robbing Americans,” Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.
“The United States is a very unfortunate for being in the wrong end of the spectrum as the greatest thieves now put their worst into mankind,” he added.
According to the report, an estimated $25 billion worth of annual sales was lost last year due to piracy.
Meanwhile, the US lawmakers said that they will start publishing the “List of Notorious Offenders” to give the public an overview of the entire problem. These will include websites that allowed unauthorized downloading and sharing of digital files over their networks.
The lawmakers singled out the websites, which include China’s Baidu, Canada’s isoHunt, Ukraine’s MP3fiesta, Sweden’s Pirate Bay, Germany’s Rapidshare and Luxembourg’s RMX4U.