Piracy is a murky phenomenon of the Internet age. No one industry has suffered as much as the music business, but do the majors face an impossible fight against piracy or are they resting on their laurels?

Anti-fraud firm MarkMonitor have come out with a poll that paints a desperate picture of the fight against online piracy. The firm monitored illegal traffic on 43 file-sharing sites and found that they generated a staggering 53 billion visits per year. The top three offending sites that they measured – RapidShare.com, Megavideo.com and Megaupload.com – generated more than 21 billion visits. Ouch. Maybe the film industry has more than hand held cameras in the cinema to worry about then.

Hollywood aside, it is definitely the music business that has struggled the most with to the rise of Internet Piracy. The majors, four labels with around 75% market share, have taken a long time to get their act together over this thorny issue. From back in the days of Napster 10 years ago, the industry has seemed to sit on its hands, hoping the problem would blow over as a passing fad. But music piracy has been rife for pretty much the whole duration of the music business.

In the days of pioneering music mogul Morris Levy, the problem could be solved with few guys paying a visit the bootleggers’ premises and smashing the place up with baseball bats. This was all well and good back then, but more sophisticated problems need more sophisticated solutions. The industry needs innovation.

So, with the exception of a few lawsuits, what is the industry doing to address and defeat the Internet pirates? Can they be beaten?

Francis Keeling, VP of digital at Universal Music Group International, doesn’t think so: “Are you going to stop piracy? No you’re not. To try and set that as an objective is just not going to succeed. Can we make piracy socially unacceptable? Absolutely, and that has to be our ambition around the world.” An honest and frank assessment and one that holds some truths. The problem is a major label appealing to peoples morality with regards to piracy. The average illegal downloader sees the huge label and big artists making wads of cash and doesn’t feel any guilt or even wrong doing in, effectively, stealing the artists work.

Setting the anti piracy agenda as a moral one alone would be missing the point: Many music fans don’t see piracy as stealing. Stealing music to them would be doing a quick grab and run at their local HMV store. Educating the masses isn’t totally worthless, but it does take a long time to change peoples inherent beliefs and customs: An illegal downloader won’t stop just because you say it’s wrong.

Keeling went further: “We’ve got markets like Spain and Italy, where [people say] ‘You buy music? What are you doing buying music when you can get it for free? Clearly those markets are in the situation where… we’re going to have a major problem having a music business there.” The good news is top figures like Keeling are demonstrating that the industry is finally starting to get the point. Asking music lovers nicely if they could please stump up the cash for an album isn’t enough. Neither is shutting down one illegal download site and waiting for another to pop up so you can do the same.

The piracy issue should have been seen as an opportunity for the music business as a whole to freshen up its act and change the way it reaches its audience. Labels should have been at the front of the queue when it came to setting up download sites. If downloading had been available legally from the start then the practice wouldn’t have become synonymous with illegality and would have flourished legally. It took iTunes to come about and seize the initiative when it should have been the majors pioneering in music on the Internet, not playing catch up.

Innovations like Spotify are the way forward for the music industry and hopefully more of these new business models will come about. It should, however, be the labels that bring them about themselves, it’s time the big players in music stopped sitting back and reacting to others.  It’s time to be proactive, not reactive.

Thankfully action is now starting to be taken. Universal has been heavy backers of the UK’s Digital Economy Act, which aims to sanction serial offenders with fines and the possibility of temporary Internet suspensions. Keeling feels the law is the “right solution”. ”The solution needs to be fair, proportionate and implemented well.” Working alongside legal streaming sites like Spotify, the music business is providing fans wider choice and more accessibility. They must continue in this vein.

The point of stopping the pirates should be to not just close them down and discourage them, but to provide services that make them obsolete. It’s time for the music industry to step up to the plate and get innovative…

What do you think, have the majors finally cracked the piracy pandemic?