The music industry is calling for tough new federal legislation to thwart the pirate CD industry.
The call comes as the industry-funded anti-piracy unit this morning crushed 120,000 illegal CDs worth more than $2.4 million.
The unit’s manager, Michael Speck, says at the moment, music fraud is too easy and too tempting.
Mr Speck says most artists have been ripped-off, as the pile of destroyed CDs illustrates.
“Bestsellers for the last five decades, from ABBA right through to Zappa – there’s probably not a mainstream artist that wasn’t represented at some level in there,” he said.
“You’ve got to remember we had 5,000 and albums in there that were MP3 albums, they’d been downloaded off the Internet and they contain an average of 12 albums so that’s something like 150 or 160 individual tracks on the one disk.”
