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RIAA Names 12 Piracy ‘Hot Spots’

RIAA Names 12 Piracy 'Hot Spots'

Where are the baddest music pirates? RIAA thinks it knows. It has identified a dozen cities it says are hotbeds of music piracy.
“The copying and trafficking of pirated music is an increasingly sophisticated trade plied by savvy multi-state criminal operations” that distribute illegal product and are designed to resemble legitimate operations, says the trade group in a study on commercial piracy. RIAA represents music labels.
Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, San Diego and San Francisco have “significant” piracy problems from the manufacturer level to the point of retail sale, says the RIAA, which plans to beef up law enforcement training and commit additional investigative resources in these cities.
The RIAA says it is targeting piracy at the source of the distribution chain. Seizures of counterfeit CDs from commercial manufacturing facilities were up more than 424,000 units last year, an increase of 46 percent, and the total number of cases at the manufacturer level was up 7 percent, the group states.
The RIAA estimates that the music industry loses more than $300 million a year in physical music sales due to piracy. Urban and Latin music genres are the most typically pirated physical (meaning non-Internet) music; they accounted for nearly 95 percent of music seized last year.

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