The number of copyright infringement in Indonesia is still very high. The losses reached trillions of rupiah due to low public awareness of the respect for intellectual property rights (IPR). According to Deputy for IPR Facilitation and Regulation of the Creative Economy Agency (Bekraf) Ari Juliano Gema, Indonesia is one of the countries with a high level of piracy. This happens because of the low level of public awareness in respecting other people’s IPR. For example, the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Indonesia once conducted a survey to determine the rate of film piracy. As a result, from the four cities surveyed, namely Jakarta, Bogor, Tangerang, and Deli Serdang, the losses reached Rp1.4 trillion due to DVD piracy and illegal downloading.
“The survey in the cities represents big cities, medium cities, and small cities,” he said in Bandung, Tuesday (10/9). In addition, data from the Indonesian Recording Industry Association (Asiri) in 2017 stated that losses due to music piracy amounted to IDR 8.4 trillion. “There is another loss for software piracy of around Rp. 12 trillion. This is based on a report from the Indonesian Anti-piracy Society,” he said.
He said the low level of public awareness in respecting other people’s IPR is due to their poor understanding of it. “From the survey, it was found that the low awareness was due to public understanding problems,” he said. He continued, this copyright infringement practice is detrimental to all parties, both the state, the creators of the work, and the community itself. The state is certain to lose tax revenue from the original goods sold. Meanwhile, the creators of the work will lose their IPR income from each work consumed by the public.
“Consumers are also disadvantaged because the quality (of the goods they consume) cannot be accounted for,” he said. Furthermore, he admitted that there were still a few authors who registered their copyright. For example, out of 8.2 million creative economy actors, only 11% of business units have registered IPR. The low IPR registration is due to various things such as costs and technicalities. According to Ari, many creative economy players are reluctant to register for IPRs because it requires a fairly expensive fee of Rp. 2 million. To overcome this problem, according to Ari, his party is helping creative economy players from the technical side to the cost. “We are facilitating free IPR registration. So far we have facilitated 5,000 creative economy actors. Assistance in both financial and technical terms,” he said.