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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has requested increased federal funding for the ongoing struggle against the pirating of recorded music. On Tuesday, April 23, the organization's executives asked the US House of Representatives' Appropriations Committee for more money to pursue pirates. Such allocations come directly from tax revenues, according to reports from Washington.

Speaking to the committee's budget panel, Frank Creighton, an RIAA executive vice president and director of the organization's anti-piracy campaign, testified that although the music industry has been pleased by recent law-enforcement efforts against pirates, he would like to see more federal funds allocated for protecting intellectual property. He also expressed concern that recently-created "CHIP" (Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property) enforcement units within the US Justice Department would focus primarily on software piracy.

"We're concerned that the focus will be computer hacking to the exclusion of intellectual property," Creighton told lawmakers. "In our view, that would be a terrible tragedy, not just for our interests, but for Americans as a whole. We need more CHIP units. We need IP to be a priority within these units."

The RIAA claims that the recording industry loses more than $4 billion annually to what it calls "physical piracy," or sales of illegally duplicated CDs. More than $1 billion of the total takes place in four countries: Brazil, China, Russia, and Mexico. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) estimates that it loses approximately $3 billion per year, most of it in the form of videotapes, DVDs, and video discs illegally copied in Asia. By contrast, the US software industry claims piracy losses as high as $12 billion annually worldwide.

Even if piracy were completely stopped tomorrow, these losses would not necessarily become gains for the affected industries. Consumers in poor countries might be willing to pay $2 apiece for pirated CDs or DVDs, but not $15–25 for the authorized versions. It's intellectually dishonest to assume that every illegal sale completed is a legal sale lost. In reality, most such sales probably represent legal sales that would have never happened. The situation is completely different in Western Europe and North America, where most consumers can afford to pay for authentic products. Piracy in such places really can eat into an intellectual property owner's bottom line.

The RIAA cooperates with the US Justice Department and many local law enforcement organizations to try to eradicate domestic physical piracy. On its website, the RIAA publishes statistics claiming to show that piracy and efforts to stop it are both on the rise: a 74% increase in piracy-related search warrants issued last year, with a 113% increase in arrests and indictments, and a 203% increase in guilty pleas and convictions. A total of 2.8 million unauthorized CD-Rs were seized in 2001, compared to 1.6 million in 2000.

The RIAA also cooperates with its global counterpart, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and with the International Recording Media Association (IRMA) in trying to contain industrial-level piracy. In a recent posting on its site, the IFPI notes with alarm that pirated recordings have reached dangerous proportions in Spain, having risen from a tolerable 5% of the market to 30% today. The situation "threatens the livelihoods" of many of Spain's greatest musicians, the organization claims, attributing the root of the problem to the common CD burner.

As with many budgetary decisions made in Washington, it's unclear if American taxpayers would approve the use of their money to support an industry in crisis. It's also uncertain, of course, whether devoting more federal funds to the piracy battle will improve Big Music's ailing bottom line.

RIAA president Hilary Rosen believes it will. "Piracy is not a private offense," she told committee members. "It hurts everyone by diminishing the incentive to invest in the creation of music. It should not, therefore, be viewed as a crime only against authors, performers, composers, musicians, record companies, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers, but against each of us."