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What are the issues relating to the value-added services market?
The issues in the value-added services (VAS) market from the operator side include the high handedness of the operator community. VAS is growing to become an industry in itself but it's not getting due credit in terms of revenue share that we are getting. Other issue is that we say that VAS is all about ideas and when we talk of ideas, it's a very good innovation to engage a subscriber in an application and increasing revenue of the operator. But there is no patenting, IPR, copyright or DRM, so there is a lot of copying and piracy and all efforts of producing an innovative product go to waste.

-Saket Agarwal, COO, Cellebrum

What steps should be taken to effectively curb content piracy?
On the handset side, there are already initiatives taken by the manufacturers, which is allowing something like DRM software on the handsets which stops the transfer/ forwarding of an application or content from one phone to another. There is a copyright and patenting government body but the amount of time it takes to get something patented does not solve the purpose and VAS is low on government radar. We need to educate people about IPR and what would happen if they don't adhere to that. Thus awareness is needed in both Service provider and developer community.

Which of the value-added services are most affected by piracy?
I think it's whichever is the most popular service today. Every service, which is introduced by one service provider and becomes a success is copied by others, be it caller tunes launched some time back or background tunes launched recently.

How much do you think piracy is affecting the VAS industry?
Piracy critically affects the innovation aspect of the VAS market. Every developer allocates a certain percentage of its revenue to innovation and if revenue is not optimum, then innovation will suffer, leading to fewer applications being developed, thereby crippling the whole industry.

What would be the future of VAS once piracy is curbed? How will 3G help in checking piracy?
The VAS market will grow anyhow but with piracy taken care of, the growth rate will be much higher. VAS is a premium service and the moment every one starts getting their fair share, the prices are going to come down and the market would grow in volumes leading to exponential growth of the VAS market.

3G will provide content providers additional bandwidth, enabling them to be able to load DRM software with the application and it will be easily downloadable by the subscribers there by making content piracy a next to impossible job.

Sonia Sharma

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