Discord and Reddit are the latest targets in the music industry’s ongoing battle against piracy and copyright infringement. Recent industry actions against YouTube pull sites have resulted in damages in the tens of millions of dollars.
The music industry reported that Discord and Reddit were in the crosshairs last week when international recording trade group IFPI called for them to be added to the next “counterfeiting and piracy watchlist”. of the EU on behalf of its 8000 members.
The report will likely continue to name YouTube rippers, cyber lockers, and torrent sites as problems. But social media and messaging platforms, including Discord, Reddit, Telegram and Twitter, are now also prime targets.
“While there are a large number of services that infringe the rights of our members, due to the serious economic harm caused by pre-release piracy, the services mentioned above – Discord, Reddit and Telegram – are considered as application priorities for the music industry and are a particular focus in this submission,” writes the IFPI.
why discord
“Particularly and problematically for the music industry, Discord has quickly become an underground marketplace for the distribution and crowdfunding of stolen, unreleased, and pre-release content through so-called ‘group buys.’ This is where users use a Discord server to hold an auction to sell unreleased or pre-release content,” says IFPI.
“We have detected numerous instances of pre-release content being distributed across the platform, including on leak-specific subreddits. REDDIT is used in combination with other services such as Discord and Twitter to promote the distribution of pre-release content,” writes IFPI.
Reddit knows it has a problem and banned 2,813 users and 2,625 subreddits after repeated violations last year.
But the IFPI says, “Reddit must take additional steps to identify and address illegal sharing of content, especially pre-post content, on the platform.”
The final report will be published later this year. A A copy of IFPI’s full submission for the European Commission’s “Counterfeiting and Piracy Watchlist” is available here (pdf) via TorrentFreak.
Bruce Houghton is founder and publisher of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and is senior adviser to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the founder and president of Skyline Artists Agency and a professor at Berklee College Of Music.
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