Website owner who sold pirate copies of Beatles music sentenced by Brazilian court to 18 months in prison.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), Brazil is one of the 10 countries (along with China, India, Indonesia, Paraguay, the Ukraine and others) where piracy is “at unacceptable levels.” But this month, the South American country showed all is not lost and raised its profile in the IP community as a result of the sentencing of the owner of a website where pirated copies of Beatles music were sold.

The sentence reflected the 140 repeated instances of copyright infringement by the perpetrator – as well as the success of IFPI's Brazilian Anti-Piracy Unit which spent five months investigating the illegal operations of the site.

Without authorization from the copyright holders, the counterfeiter compiled music from The Beatles, compacted them into .mp3 format, and sold it for an average price of R$15 (approximately US$7). Buyers could complete the transaction through a direct bank deposit, after which the counterfeit compilations were mailed to the buyers anywhere within Brazil.

Following the investigation, the case was presented to the special cybercrime police division in São Paulo. A search and seizure raid was conducted and the police seized computers belonging to the website administrator, as well as a CD burner and pirate CDs. The equipment was sent for a forensic examination, which concluded that it had been used to persistently violate copyright.

The 18th Criminal Court of São Paulo sentenced the pirate website operator to one year and eight months imprisonment. In sentencing the culprit, the court recognized that the crime had been perpetrated more than 140 times under similar conditions and this factor increased the length of the prison sentence by two-thirds.

Late last year, Brazilian authorities conducted three major anti-piracy operations, in which they seized a total of: one million blank optical units, 385 burners, computer notebooks valued at over $800,000, and hundreds of thousands of DVDs and CD-Rs containing pirated music and movies.

One of the major pirate markets in the world, Brazil has more than one billion music tracks illegally downloaded each year and counterfeit discs accounting for up to half of all CDs and DVDs sold in the country. Such rampant piracy directly affects Brazilian composers, artists and producers as local repertoire accounts for 75 per cent of the music market.

Total losses to the audiovisual and music industries in Brazil are estimated at US$198 million per year. According to data provided by the Brazilian National Anti-Piracy Council (CNCP), pirate products cost the Brazilian economy two million jobs per year and reduce tax revenues by US$15 billion.