Porto Alegre, Brazil. Photo Credit: Camila Gallon
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has formally announced Operation Redirect, billed as an initiative targeting “illegal online music services” in Brazil.
The IFPI touted the rollout and early results of Operation Redirect, supported by the industry representative and spearheaded by Brazilian law enforcement agencies, via a brief release today. As some know, Brazil’s quick-expanding music market was the ninth largest in the world last year by the IFPI’s own measure.
And amid continued growth for the South American nation’s recorded sector, which generates the vast majority of its revenue from streaming, the IFPI has made multiple moves in recent years to decommission domestically prominent piracy platforms, fake stream services, and others.
Enter Operation Redirect, which aims to curb the prevalence of “illegal sites associated with malware distribution.”
Predictably, those ostensibly malware-plagued sites include web addresses tied in one way or another to “unauthorized music,” the IFPI noted. Operation Redirect’s “first iteration” led to the takedown of eight sites, among them “illegal linking music” platforms, stream-rippers, and “Torrent search engines.”
While the IFPI didn’t list the targeted sites, it did indicate that they’d racked up a cumulative 12 million or so visits in Brazil (population 215 million) last year. Furthermore, CEO Victoria Oakley in a statement underscored the belief that Operation Redirect represents “an important step forward” in Brazil, where Warner Music and others are continuing to invest.
“Operation Redirect is an important step forward in our work to protect music in Brazil from being shared illegally online,” Oakley communicated. “It wouldn’t be possible without the cooperation of The Ministry of Justice and Public Security and Brazilian law enforcement. Finding and stopping these illegal online services is vital to protecting the careers of Brazilian artists and to the online safety of Brazilian music fans.”
Of course, Brazil is hardly the only market where efforts are in full swing to shut down stream-rippers and others. Earlier in August, the IFPI revealed that a German court had ordered a fake stream provider to cease operating.
However, in a testament to the difficulties of eliminating the problem, it wasn’t long before the domain simply began redirecting visitors to a decidedly similar site. Said site, also offering all manner of artificial engagement on tracks, artist profiles, social accounts, and more, was still live at the time of this writing.
Stateside, though the focus has in many ways shifted from artificial plays and stream-rippers and towards AI giants as well as the alleged infringement of (different) ISPs’ subscribers, litigation is ongoing between Hartford-based Yout and the RIAA. Per the relevant docket, there hasn’t been any substantial movement in the case, referring specifically to Yout’s appeal, for some time.
