Anti-Piracy Initiative

What is the Anti-Piracy initiative?  Simply put it is the KIAA’s enforcement program to combat piracy in the karaoke industry by using a two-pronged approach.  The first is to aggressively pursue and prosecute where applicable anyone who is knowingly engaging, enabling, participating or assisting in any way, acts of piracy.  The KIAA will not only target its efforts at the supply chain (i.e. dealers, websites, user groups etc.), but also at the performance level as well, including KJ hosts and venues using unauthorized content.

The second part of the program is to remove pirated karaoke music from the marketplace regardless as to how it was acquired.  While it is the ultimate goal of the KIAA to rid the industry of pirated music entirely at all levels, we recognize at the outset that the one area which could be positively impacted immediately is in the commercial market, and in particular at the performance level.  Consequently this is the area where we will initially focus our attention.

As we begin to launch this initiative, many of you (both non-members and members alike) will begin to question as to why you will be required to purge your libraries of content that you purchased which you thought was legal, but turns out in the end that it was not.  Perhaps the best way to answer that question is by using the following stolen automobile analogy.

If you had stolen a car, you would be guilty of auto-theft as you well know, and if that car was used as a private livery or taxi, then in addition to auto-theft it would be a commercial use of a stolen vehicle which could carry additional civil and/or criminal charges and penalties.  Likewise If you illegally downloaded, copied or shared a song whether merely for personal use or for commercial benefit (such as in hosting a karaoke show for profit), it still qualifies as stealing and hence is piracy.  As in the case of the stolen automobile, a commercial use could carry additional charges and penalties.

Let’s take this analogy a bit further.  Suppose you are an automobile dealer that knowingly sells stolen automobiles.  You might have two types of customers, a few unsuspecting customers who are unaware that the vehicles are stolen and think that they are just getting a great deal, or you may have the well-informed customers who either know, or strongly suspect that these vehicles are stolen.  These are customers who in many cases deliberately seek out dealers that deal in stolen vehicles, knowing that they will be able to purchase these vehicles at prices well below fair market value.

There are two things worth noting with this scenario.  The first is that all parties (other than the unwitting customer) have knowingly engaged in illegal activity and would be criminally and/or civilly prosecuted for their crimes.  The second thing worth noting is that in all cases, whether or not the customer made these purchases knowingly or not, the customer can’t keep the automobile and must surrender custody of the vehicle to its rightful owner.

There’s nothing preventing the customer of course from contacting the actual owner of the vehicle in an attempt to purchase that automobile in hopes that under the circumstances, the owner might give the victim a break on the price.

Nevertheless, the customer is out whatever monies that he or she paid for that automobile from the crooked automobile dealer.  It then becomes the responsibility of that illegal dealership or seller to reimburse the customer for his or her losses and not the owner of the vehicle.  The customer’s only recourse here would be a reimbursement by the initial seller, either by mutual consent or in the form of court ordered restitution should the dealer or seller be prosecuted and convicted.

Just as in the above scenario, there are karaoke consumers who unknowingly purchase illegal karaoke music (although it is hard to believe that anyone would think it is legal to purchase a hard drive containing 17,000 songs at a price slightly more than the price of the hard drive itself), while other customers know full well that these songs are illegal or questionable at best, and deliberately seek out sellers of these illegal karaoke products.

Similar to the case above with illegal automobile sales, whether the karaoke customer knowingly or unknowingly purchased illegal karaoke music is irrelevant, and the customer is still not allowed to keep the stolen music.  They must either purge that music from their library or make other arrangements to re-purchase that music.  As in the above automobile theft scenario, their only recourse for reimbursement of the monies for which they were swindled, would be from the dealer or seller that sold the illegal product.