How do you convince potential customers to pay for a product they can get for free? This question has harrowed the struggling music industry since illegal, free music began flooding the Internet in the mid-1990s.

For I-legalne.cz, the Czech Republic’s largest online music vendor, the answer is Ízy. Launched in late June, Ízy is a new service that lets customers access I-legalne’s entire 500,000-song music catalog for a flat subscription fee of 249 Kč ($17) a month.

As the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) continues to crack down on local online music pirates, the service aims to provide users with a cheap, risk-free alternative to illegal music downloading.

“It’s an all-you-can eat buffet,” said Petr Peřina, marketing director of I-legalne. While declining to disclose the exact amount of subscribers that have signed up so far, Peřina said the number was “in the thousands.”

With Ízy, subscribers can download an unlimited number of songs, play them on their computers or load them onto an MP3 player. Once the subscription expires, the songs do too.

I-legalne hopes that Ízy’s large catalog and relatively low price will attract students looking to keep up with the newest music, as well as families with differing tastes. “Someone might hate Madonna, someone might hate classical,” Peřina said. “But no one in a family hates music.”

Ízy’s advantage over illegal downloading, Peřina said, is convenience and safety. “It’s all here in one place. You don’t have to go here and there, or worry about getting viruses,” he said.

But “easy” is in the eye of the beholder, and much of Ízy’s potential appeal rests on the theory that most people would rather spend a few crowns than invest extra minutes to find the latest track for free.

Record companies — whose profits in the Czech Republic fell 19 percent last year, according to IFPI — assert that this assumption does not bear out in reality.“

85 percent [of the profit loss] is due to piracy,” said Petra Žikovská, director of the Czech branch of IFPI. To reverse the negative trend, IFPI has targeted distributors of illegal content in order to make free downloading more difficult.

No more pirates

Until I-legalne.cz entered the market in late 2006, no legal source for digital music existed in the Czech Republic, preventing the IFPI from prosecuting online pirates.

But, with I-legalne on the scene, IFPI began monitoring illegal files aggressively, initiating a slew of raids and prosecutions for online copyright violation.

Working with a police unit specializing in computer crime, the IFPI tracked down a 34-year-old IT worker sharing more than 750 gigabytes of illicit movies and music. That effort led to the first conviction for Internet piracy in Czech history last April, when the IT worker received a suspended seven-year prison sentence.

One year later, the IFPI announced April 23 another major breakthrough in the fight against illegal music downloading: The organization tracked a major distributor of illegal music to a privately owned server based in the Academy of Sciences. The server was shut down, and more than 4 terabytes of illegal content were confiscated.

These cases prompted the IFPI to hold lectures and seminars to educate local judges and lawyers who often lack experience with the complexities of Internet copyright law.

These efforts seem to be having some effect on the illegal music trade. According to the IFPI, the number of “hubs” — computers that account for the majority of illegal music distribution — active in the Czech Republic has declined 50 percent since the beginning of the year.

Still, the Czech Republic should do more to encourage Internet service providers to cooperate in the fight against piracy, Žikovská said. Much of the IFPI’s monitoring activity rests on exchanging information with Internet service providers, and some have been less than forthcoming, she added.

Breaking the trend

Recent developments suggest that other European governments are also moving toward a harder line in their approach to music piracy. Earlier this year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy pushed through a “three-strike” law, which requires Internet service providers to filter illegal files and cut off customers’ Internet access after their third copyright law infringement. A similar law was proposed in the United Kingdom but failed in Parliament.

In addition to enforcement, the IFPI is working to encourage legal alternatives to downloading pirated music. Currently, digital music accounts for about 5 percent of the music sales in the Czech Republic, but Žikovská says this will only grow. “The Internet is the medium of the future,” she said.

Together, the IFPI and I-legalne.cz represent two sides of the local effort to stop casual copyright infringement by millions of users who download music illegally from the Internet.

As the IFPI shuts down illegal music hubs to make pirating harder and riskier, companies like I-legalne.cz and its competitors on the Czech market — Allmusic.cz and T-Music—try to make accessing legal digital music easier and cheaper.

“I don’t want to fight piracy,” explains Peřina of I-legalne.cz. “I want to provide a solution.”

The Prague Post