MUMBAI: Indian Music Industry (IMI) with the help of Cyber Crime Wing of Mumbai Police tracked down pirated website songsdl.com, which allowed people to download pirated music and songs for free. IMI has been tracking more than 80 such illegal sites catering to Indian music content.

Kalpesh Patel, a final year engineering student who founded the website songsdl.com in 2010 was arrested in Rajkot, Gujarat on 2 July, Patel confessed to the crime before the police authorities and was taken to Mumbai and put in judicial custody. He was presented in the Killa court located at the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

Commenting on the success of the operation, Indian Music Industry (IMI) and Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) president Vijay Lazarus said, IMI is extremely happy to have made a breakthrough in the first-of-its-kind cyber crime in India. This arrest will send out a strong message to all the people who are dealing in music piracy in the web-world and think they will not be discovered. We have leads into 80 such websites catering to Indian music content and we have already strengthened our operations by registering an FIR on 23 websites out of the lot....

The intensive six month long investigation exposed the music website (www.songsdl.com) and further investigations also revealed that the accused was in parallel running another music website - www.mp3don.com - since 2006 doling out pirated music. Both the websites have been tracked to an IP address located in Denmark.

IMI which represents the music industry in India, has highlighted the matter to its parent body IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), who is working closely with the Interpol in Denmark to ensure that the content is seized and frozen to be produced in the court of law in its original form.

Commenting on the case, IMI secretary general Savio D'Souza said, Internet piracy is becoming the most damaging form of piracy for the music industry in India which is witnessing huge drop in sales. The problem is particularly challenging to counter because the sites are often registered in faraway countries. Pinning down these pirates is a difficult as they can easily evade countervailing measures by camouflaging the IP addresses, tweaking the name of a website and hence require consistent vigilance. We would like to acknowledge and appreciate the relentless efforts and exemplary work carried out by the Mumbai police authorities in making this case a huge success....

The team on the case was headed by Mumbai joint commissioner of Police Himanshu Roy, while senior Police Inspector Nandkishore More and Inspector Ghosalkar are carrying out further investigation in this case. Music piracy is growing at a very fast pace and has become one of the major problems in India.