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The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which numbers the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America among its members, has urged the US Trade Representative Rob Portman to immediately designate Russia as a Priority Foreign Country and thereby suspend its eligibility for duty-free trade privileges under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) programme for countries that effectively protect US copyrights.

IIPA president Eric Smith said that Russia's unwillingness...to curb high rates of piracy - particularly through more effective deterrent and enforcement - saps the US economy of the high-paying jobs and strong growth rates that are characteristic of the copyright-based sector'.

The alliance claims that 'piracy' rates in Russia - the proportion of software or media content that has been copied - are as high as 80 per cent. It says that the Russian government has failed to clampdown on both file sharing and disc counterfeiting operations as well as what it describes as some of the world's most open and notorious websites, citing allofmp3.com as a prime example. Previous attempts to shut down this downloads store have failed despite ostensible Russian government support.

The IIPA has also called on the Trade Representative

Smith said that while the IIPA has chiefly focussed on disc counterfeiting as the biggest source of copyright infringement, it is now concentrating more resources on the role of the Internet.

'Internet piracy has jumped up many notches on our list of priorities and challenges,' he said 'The incredible growth of broadband, particularly in Asia, has threatened to undermine many of the law reform and enforcement gains that have been laboriously achieved in many countries. For some years Internet piracy has been a developed country issue and governments in these countries have adjusted their laws and enforcement systems. But now countries like China, India, South Korea and others soon will have more people connected to the Internet than in the United States.'

Nonetheless that doesn't mean that disc copying can be ignored, with all its social as well as economic implications.

'We call upon the governments of all countries to halt the rapid spread of optical disc piracy and to fight collectively to bring to justice the organized criminal syndicates that control it,' Smith continued. 'These syndicates generate billions of dollars in virtually risk-free profits. Markets worldwide are being swamped by illegal CDs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, "burned" CD-Rs, DVD-Rs and similar optical disc products that threaten to undermine many of the anti-piracy gains made in the last decade.'

He called on governments to pass strong optical disc regulations to enhance existing copyright laws and then to enforce those regulations vigorously.