The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry acts on the behalf of the international recording industry. This large organisation acts for 1,500 record producers and distributors in 76 countries worldwide.

Overview

The IFPI Secretariat is responsible for co-ordinating international strategies in the key areas of the organisation's work, such as anti-piracy enforcement, technology, legal strategies, litigation and public relations. It also lobbies governments and has representation in international organisations.

Based in London with links to regional offices in Brussels, Hong Kong, Miami, Moscow, etc. the Secretariat is the recording industry's most authoritative source of market research and information, providing a comprehensive range of global industry statistics.

The Requirements

In recognition of the growing market in pirated pre-release material. The IFPI Anti-Piracy Enforcement department required a system that would enable them to distribute information on new albums and their release dates. As this was global effort there was a requirement that the system should handle foreign languages so that regional offices could coordinate search and seizure operations with the latest information from the site.

The Solution

Release Schedule Database

This system was initially just a public web view of the release date information stored in the database which was entered by an administrator at the IFPI. It was then decided that inputting new artist album releases would be opened up to the regional anti-piracy offices. This is so regional offices could coordinate their efforts on apprehending local repertoire infringements.

Becuase of this international effort, the system then needed to handle all international languages such as Chinese and Greek so we built an administration system which would cater for all languages. The system also allows users to add their own images of the pre-release material so that it is easier to identify pirated copies. The system dynamically resizes the uploaded images so that they are all kept at a standard size. There is also a print option so that regional investigators can take handouts with them on search and seizure investigations.

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