New Delhi: While the increasing penetration of smartphones has helped more Indians access the Internet, it is a cause of worry to one country—the US.

The US believes that as more and more Indians access the Internet, online piracy may become even more widespread than it is now.

In its Special 301 Report for 2015 released by the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) on Thursday, the US said that while its stakeholders eagerly anticipate India’s growth in its Internet user base, “they also fear increased piracy as a negative corollary to this growth".

The number of mobile Internet users in India is expected to reach 213 million by June 2015, a 23% jump over six months, according to the Mobile Internet in India 2014 report released by the Internet and Mobile Association of India in January. The online user base of India is projected to be the second largest in the world with as many as 370 million users by the end of 2015, the USTR report said.

“This trend makes it all the more imperative that India incorporate into its legal system more effective measures to counter online piracy. The United States encourages the Government of India to adopt effective measures to counter online piracy, including appropriate notice-and-takedown procedures and other efficient mechanisms for rights holders to seek removal of infringing content from websites, consistent with international best practices," the report added.

The pirate tracking firm Excipio recently said India topped the chart of pirated downloads of the blockbuster action movie Furious 7, starring Vin Diesel, with 578,000 illegal downloads till 6 April, followed by Pakistan (321,000), China (289,000), the US (251,000) and the UK (101,000).

In another report on out-of-cycle review of notorious markets released by the USTR in March, the US said torrent website Extratorrent.cc hosted from Ukraine is also highly popular in India.

“While Extratorrent has been the subject of successful enforcement actions in the UK, Italy, and Belgium, it maintains a global Alexa ranking of 345 and, notably, an Alexa ranking in India of 70, illustrating the commercial impact that sites which facilitate infringement can have on geographically diverse markets," it added. Alexa ranks website popularity based on traffic.

The site has extremely high rates of piracy with more than 1.4 million unauthorized files, tens of millions of users, and almost ten billion unique visits a month, it said.

Other torrent websites such as kickass.to (28) and torrentz.in (61) also feature among the top 100 websites in India, according to Alexa.

The first draft of the national intellectual property rights (IPR) policy prepared by the IPR think-tank of the commerce and industry ministry says, “Online piracy has assumed increasing significance and by its very nature blurs geographical borders, which creates difficulties in enforcement. It is in India’s interest to further strengthen the enforcement authorities and step up enforcement measures so that IP violations including online piracy can be curbed effectively, efficiently and swiftly. Adjudication of IP disputes also ought to be effective and expeditious. Additionally, in order to check piracy and counterfeiting on a voluntary basis, efforts shall be made to sensitize society to the value of IP and create respect for IP rights."

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