The ESA has praised the bipartisan
Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus for its direct approach to tackling piracy in 2009: the caucus made Spain, Canada, Mexico, Russia and China the priorities for the year.
ESA CEO Michael Gallagher thanked the Caucus:
"We thank the Caucus for this year issuing a challenge to Canada and Mexico to pass additional legislative protections - such as prohibitions on 'mod chips' and other circumvention devices that are used to play pirated games - and to follow through with greater enforcement and border controls," said Gallagher.
"We also thank the Caucus for highlighting the severe problems that exist for our industry and other copyright industries in Spain. Online and peer-to-peer piracy are rampant and virtually unchecked in Spain and in other major European markets. Highlighting the problem is an important step, and, we hope, will spur efforts by all stakeholders to find a solution," concluded Gallagher.
But
GamePolitics points us to a rebuttal by Nick Farrell of the UK's
Inquirer that paints the Caucus as a bunch of hypocrites "tamed" by the RIAA:
The RIAA has got its tame politicians in the US congress to rail at other nations that don't hold such a jack-booted attitude toward copyright infringement as the Land of the Free...
[IAPC] singled out Baidu, China's largest Internet search engine, as being "responsible for the vast majority of illegal music downloading in China." That's interesting, because Baidu does the same thing as Google which, as a powerful US company, the music industry has not dared to denounce...
It seems almost as though the entertainment mafiaa would like the US to mount a cross-border raid into Canada over its perceived lack of draconian copyright enforcement and wants the US to treat its NATO ally Spain as a pariah for having the temerity to say that peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet isn't a crime.
There you have it - as is almost always the case, one man's profit is another man's painted pony. At least nobody accused Nintendo of being in bed with the music industry when
Nintendo presented the US with a list of its own pirate-linked nations - and asked the US for help stamping down piracy in some of the same countries - namely China, Mexico and Spain.
