Check this scenario (it’s probably familiar):

You are a musician who has released music across a variety of legal digital platforms. Your fans can purchase your latest album on your own online store or at their favorite digital retailer for a reasonable price. Increasingly, though, you’re hearing that your fans are picking up copies from third party sites that aren’t licensed to carry your content. You blast off an angry email to that site telling them to cease and desist; they ignore your emails and continue selling your music, handling the payments through major payment processors.

Thanks to a new voluntary agreement between the major payment processors (credit card companies and PayPal) brokered by the Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, independent musicians and those with label representation now have an additional tool for dealing with online intellectual property infringement.

This new best practices system creates an open, transparent and hopefully efficient mechanism for reporting infringement direct to the payment processor for review and potential action. Read our handy short guide for musicians on this new system, how it works and how you can use it to stop intellectual property infringement online.