Indonesia's music industry loses $1.65M a day from online piracy

Indonesia's music industry is facing up to a daily loss of 16 billion rupiah (US$1.65 million) a day due to illegal online downloads, and the country's complex patent registration system is not helping the situation.

Citing figures from the Indonesian Record Industry Association (AIRI), The Jakarta Post reported last Saturday that rampant online piracy has undermined the local music industry.

No less than 6 million people each day would illegally consume music content and this has resulted in sharp decline in the sale of music CDs, with only 11 million copies sold in 2012 compared with the annual average of 90 million copies several years back, it noted.

Euis Saedah, director general of small and medium-sized enterprises at the Industry Ministry of Indonesia, said while the government's anti-piracy campaigns were launched 13 years ago, people's awareness of intellectual property rights (IPR) remained low.

The situation is not helped by a complex IPR system for which local artistes can obtain copyright for their literary and artistic works. The report noted the process for filing copyright locally is done via a complicated paper-based registration, and Suryani Motik, chairman of the Indonesian Indigenous Entrepreneurs Group, said it could take about 18 months to obtain the copyright or patent.