I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s a shameful bill that has barely any positive points. However the bill’s passage through the Lords is what it is, we need to see what the resultant document is that is passed to the commons and THEN make a huge fuss. MPs are much more likely to act upon the public’s concerns than the Lords in this matter, many of which having shown their personal interest in big business profiting despite victimising innocent people with these kinds of threats.

Copyright theft has had a significant effect on the music business. I know that the biz has been pretty unattractive in the past, and Simon Cowell is always there to remind us. However the conservatism we see in music can be attributed to the lack of cash to risk on new, interesting or unusual talents. Things aere not going to get better unless something is done about it. (I have two friends, both talented musicians who used to play in signed bands, who have left the business. One now works for Bristol City Council and the other freelances a bit of production and trains students.)

Of course this bill is crap and should be resisted. Its designed to have negative consequences that serve the wishes of the Home Office more than copyright holders. Perhaps the whole system of copyright needs re-examining?

Much better to have some small levy from service providers, perhaps? A cheap subscription rate for downloads? There are negative consequences to these. At the same time the business needs to look at how it uses the internet. They got bitten by refusing to consider that their business model was changing, like it or not.

I dont agree with these new laws.
Mandelson was talking about cutting off peoples internet connection from his bunker based on people being accuse of file sharing.

Real wealth transfer is going on here and Labour are against it because they are not getting the credit and have little control over it.

Adam the Libertarian

>However the conservatism we see in music can be attributed to the lack of cash to risk on new, interesting or unusual talents. Things aere not going to get better unless something is done about it. (I have two friends, both talented musicians who used to play in signed bands, who have left the business. One now works for Bristol City Council and the other freelances a bit of production and trains students.)

Sorry, this is not the case.

The recording industry has already shifted it’s business model to live music from recorded music, and revenue was *up* in 2009:

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86724/uk-music-economist-says-music-industry-revenue-up-4-7/

The law as proposed is not necessary.

@ 2 Is that true though -? A lot of reasearch shows that people who file share actually purcahse larger than average amounts of music legally as well.

Copyright theft has always happened, I remember the musicos making the same complaints when music centres were fist invented back in the 1970s (music centre = integrated radio/turntable/tape deck that made it poiible, for the first time, for the non technical to copy recorded music at home).

The only time I ever tried it – on Limewire about 5 years ago – my anti-virus software lit up like a christmas tree and it took me a week to clean my PC. Never again.

I heard on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago (so it MUST be true!) that most down-loaders buy legitimate music products anyway.

It seems that this whole DEB thing is just another desperate though real and dangerous – attempt to regulate the web as “democracies” (read: “vested interests”) stagger further into crisis. Only way to explain the illogic.

Indeed, Obama said last week that he would welcome a “neutral web” … Wonder what he meant by that? “Neutralised” perhaps?

This bill would have nearly no impact on the scale of copyright theft in this country, or anywhere. The technology exists, and continues to be developed, that evades any method of detection proscribed for in the bill.

This bill will only serve to degrade the rights and privacy of this country’s inhabitants.

Cory Doctorow and others sum up (some of) the impact of the bill well in this video by Mark Thomas. There are contributions from supporters of the bill also:

http://bit.ly/aZOcDl

I cannot comprehend of a single justification to pass these laws. Please support this campaign.

@4

Yes, live music is becoming more important. However the bands that make money are the big, established acts. I don’t want U2 to be the only stuff available in 10 years time, they’re insufferable enough already.

Perhaps bands touring village halls in transit vans will return and lead to a democratisation of music, but its pretty tough on a lot of the talent out there today. From what I see file sharing does damage music more significantly than taping did because of its sheer scale. If people who file share also buy music one has to ask where all the money has gone, because a lot of musicians see none of it.

It is the fault of the biz, they tried to hold back progress instead of adapting. The proposed digital communications act is using this to try to control and monitor the use of the internet, which is sinister and needs to be opposed.

It’s a stupid law because of who is doing it. Mainly young teenagers who have been so use to downloading that they honestly don’t look upon it as a crime.
In the end it will parents like myself , who hasn’t an idea what a bloody idea what a download is , who will paying mortgage money in fines.
Before you say, parental control.
Unless you are a very strange man or women with a LOT of time on their hands to look after your kid on the internet is a near impossible task.
Do your course work son.

music file-sharing and illegal downloads have destroyed my livelihood as a music producer and also that of several of my friends and colleagues.

I am so sick of the mean and nasty comments I read everywhere. If you had your income robbed and your chance of earning a living destroyed then you might have a more balanced view of all this copyright infringement.

It is not the record labels ( I don’t give a damn about them)…it’s the musicians and all the creators of music that you have killed off!

.

Roger, the mean comments some people make seem to me to be in direct response to the approach of the top of the industry – the labels and so on – attacking everyone’s rights because they wish to enforce against a small number of infringers.

Nearly everyone I speak to has a lot of sympathy for musicians, and wants the music industry to make money on the internet.

Many of us are frustrated that the concentration of rights in four or five company groupings seems to make it impossible for those rights holders to decide how to change their businesses. Witness Warner this week withdrawing streaming rights, or the dispute last year with Youtube.

But mostly we are adamant that collective punishment and curtailed justice is not the answer.

I hope this helps.

Jim
You are right to campaign for the fair punishment of copyright infringement.
However the majority of your supporters will not want any punishment of any kind and will seek to have no infringement of their ‘rights’.
I would like to see the Open Rights Group campaign on a more balanced ticket so that the likes of “Roger” above can be more supportive of what you are doing.
Speak out more against the notion that out of control file ‘sharing’ is democracy, be more vocal about the rights of the creators.
I think this shift in how we feel about the internet will happen, its just going take time.

I have to say that’s I’m not entirely sure what they are hoping that this bill will accomplish. I completely agree that it’s awful that musicians are being forced out of the business by lack of funds, but for this to be the driving argument behind the bill, the assumption has to be that a reduction in music piracy will automatically lead to an increase in legal sales. Which just isn’t the case. If you like a song/album/artist enough, you will generally pay the peanuts it costs to get the music (I downloaded 35 Frank Turner songs for less than £4 on Amazon the other day). If, on the other hand, it’s just a vague interest in a band you don’t know about, you’re highly unlikely to go and spend money on it, even if you would have illegally downloaded it.

Essentially, stopping illegal downloading won’t increase music profits; all it will do is drastically reduce the circulation of non-mainstream bands who are the ones that most desperately need the publicity.

Sly, I know our supporters. They are law abiding citizens, many of whom depend on copyright as creators of software, books and art. Our advisory council includes a number of well-known authors, several journalists and at least two people at high levels of the music industry.

The individuals who fund us are much the same. We spend a lot of time arguing for extremely sensible copyright reform, including changes to user rights to allow format shifting.

What people are upset about here is nothing to do with illicit filesharers. We are angry about the erosion of fundamental rights because of the problems of industry. Industry’s problems are complex, and the options for change are in fact very wide, including many possible changes to copyright licensing and business practices, some touched on in comments above. All involve winners and losers.

But the solutions are also nothing to do with crackdowns that remove due process and legal safeguards. Copyright enforcement and industry cannot be allowed to erode the fundamentals of law.

“Essentially, stopping illegal downloading won’t increase music profits; all it will do is drastically reduce the circulation of non-mainstream bands who are the ones that most desperately need the publicity.” …. this is frankly rubbish. In countries where there has been recent introduction of regulation ( Sweden) Music sales have bounced back by 18%.

Also Indie labels are really struggling and some argue that they are being even worse affected. new Indie acts need to sell their music or they cannot possibly exist. There needs to be some ability to guarantee copyright. ( and please no guff about going out and playing live..there is no money in that until you are famous)

I understand people’s concerns about liberty. but content that can be digitised is just going to be constantly stolen by huge numbers of people and we face the end of music, publishing, novels and the incentive for individuals to create anything and place it in the public domain. That is a far more important issue in my humble opinion. The government may be tackling this in a heavy handed way but to sit back and let this take its course will be very damaging. Solutions??? Some regulation that is directed and some disincentive to those that take stuff for free all the time and think the world just owes them.

Jim
I didnt mean your supporters in that sense, Im sorry if you thought that. I was talking about the many who have no interest at all in the balance of rights that you mention and are simply troughing it. The millions across the land who are filling their ipods simply cause its free.
Due process and all the things you mention are important I agree so really we are not in disagreement. I just want to add to the debate the very important concept of the difference between sharing and stealing which we all understand but some prefer to gloss over.
Keep up your good work in protecting people and dont be afraid to support measures that punish as well.

Roger, the analyses from Swedish academics and the UK’s Consumer Focus of Swedish stats doesn’t portray any such bounce back of record sales, but does show, as in the UK, that payments for online licenses (such as paid by Youtube and Spotify) and live music have made up for the decline in physical sales.

I think we have to be very careful in identifying where the problems the recording industry are located. For many years, the record industry did very well as people replaced vinyl with new CDs – with digital they have simply ripped their CDs to mp3. Plus the pricing has fallen naturally, because digital is cheap.

Finally, the industry has resisted changing to innovative new models. Licensing is still restrictive and all too easy to revoke – which (as one link above shows) has removed investor confidence. Our own work has shown very restrictive practices from the main music labels, stopping new services from getting going because they are uncertain about their impact.

Despite this, in both the UK and Sweden, overall music revenues including live have been roughly static.

Blaming infringers for the recorded music industry’s troubles is too simplistic. Putting these simplistic notions into law will not do anyone any good.

I have added this comment elsewhere, along with others from an IT background. We live in a new age – it is not going to be possible to prevent people from sharing digital content. There are commercial and non-commercial services that can so successfully encrypt and obfuscate data transmission it is nigh on impossible to decipher or trace. Owners of copyrighted digital content MUST look at new delivery methods for their content. As someone elsewhere on the net pointed out – Napster was shut down 10 years ago and the major players in the music industry still haven’t released a commercial alternative, it’s astonishing that they have failed to recognise and exploit that market / delivery method. Rachael is correct when she says that it’s easier to just pay £4 (see above) – now imagine how many people would do that on MGMster or WarnerWire! Personally I don’t really like compressed, lossy audio and video formats (which is everything downloadable and CDs). If the music industry hadn’t been so quick to rip off consumers when they flogged everybody shoddy quality CDs in the 90s we might not now see so many true audiophiles suffering from ‘upgrade fatigue’. The SACD failed because they wanted to flood the market with poor quality, and now, when the industry could be saved by high definition, with it’s associated almost undownloadable file sizes and binary formats – (see SACD on wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD) – it’s probably too late, and they have only themsleves to blame.

The music industry has been really slow to adapt to Internet technology. As well as failing to provide a legal version of Napster, high quality files are yet another untapped market.

I’m an audiophile, yet the ironic thing is if I wanted to download a track at the highest quality, I’d have to use an illegal service. There’s still no legal way to download music in Lossless FLAC format. This is a ridiculous situation where the free, illegal versions of certain tracks are superior and more desirable than the legal versions you can actually buy!

I’m convinced that if the music industry offered the services the fans are clearly demanding, infringement would reduce rapidly. Ill-advised schemes which go against the basic principles of justice are not the answer. The Digital Economy Bill won’t do anything to stop file-sharing and will ultimately only put consumers off.

Roger
I don’t see a decline in sales of CD’s.

Perhaps the music industry will bring the price down to reasonable level due to presures from the net.

Gordon
Do you think the world owes you the luxury of taking as much as you want for free until the price suits you?
The music industry is all the things it is accused of..yes. Mandelson is probably all the things he is accused of. But accuse the great British public of greed and selfishness …never!

Sly, what you’re perhaps missing here is that copyright is a mechanism and a system, not a ‘natural right’. Copyright is granted by governments, like patents, for a limited time in order that the creators may try to command a payment based on what the market will bear.

Sometimes those payments have been placed into the sale of physical goods (a small percentage of a book or record’s price). Sometimes they are placed into something larger, like the BBC Licence Fee, which pays copyright fees for music and non-BBC programmes to be broadcast on BBC TV and radio.

Clearly, those mechanisms have been easy to disentangle in the digital age, and this will get worse. In a few years, everything ever recorded will be placeable on every portable device …

For this sort of reason, some people have said, well, let’s have a ‘flat rate’ of say £5 a month to pay for all the copyright fees on every broadband account that wants to use them. Others have said, well, the businesses need simple ‘all you can eat’ music services (one fee, download what you like).

The point is that the end user shouldn’t be thinking too hard, but doing what they want to do, while payments happen. Models that work in copyright depend on systems that let users do what they want to do, and don’t try to place large enforcement mechanism to police every user.

If they do try to enforce, like the BBC License or Sky subscriptions, they concentrate on a single payment and service, not the individual copyright units. Imagine the BBC made you pay per view, and then tried to sue people on the basis of the programmes they watched without a licence, and you get a feel how wrongheaded the DEB’s enforcement approach really is.

Jim
All that you say is good and very agreeable.
But until what you say is in place ie some kind of licence in some form or other then the public should have the good grace to wait, it wont kill them. Having to suffer the pain of a grainy mp3 and not the full spec is part of the respect that is due to the creative artist.

Sly, under that approach the people who suffer, ironically, will be the artists and society at large. Every time technology comes along, copyright finds itself out of step with technological possibilities, it gets broke and is fixed retrospectively.

Take vinyl records (broke sheet music copyright), commercial ‘pirate’ radio (broke broadcasting copyright restrictions on the number of times a record could be played), video recorders (broke copyright restrictions on making copies of tv programmes) the internet (broke copyright restrictions on making any copies, including temporary copies) or ipods (breaks copyright restrictions on making personal copies even today).

If we said ‘fix the law first’, it’s quite possible that none of these technologies would have got off the ground … they were all illicit and infringing.

That’s one of the problems with copyright – it’s designed to fit a simple model (the C18th printing press) and copy-based and follow-on-use technologies have a hard time with that simple model, they’re almost bound to break it.

This is why we see this unwanted behaviour (infringement) as primarily a problem of market failure, that will only really be addressed by changes to business and copyright licensing. Respect for artists and their rights is fair, and even enforcement has its place, but until you get the business models in place, you don’t really know what you need to enforce or who against.

Just to make it clear, we would rather people did not infringe, of course. But we need to understand the behaviour’s cause if we want to reduce it.

I think its important to focus on the intention of any legislation in this area. From postings above it seems to me that what is needed is a way to ensure the creators of works are properly paid so they can make a career out of their talent. The old-style biz had its failures in this respect and although the internet seemed to offer new opportunities it now seems to be undermining creative career opportunities.

While the proposed Act may send out the right signals it has so many collateral concerns that it must, as it stands, be considered bad law. (Its notable it was dreamt up in secret negotiatons between US and UK governments at the same time as the Homeland Security paranoia had respective governments spying on their citizens communications).

This complicated issue is a toughy, but it seems to me that some kind of small levy on ISPs, like the license fee hated by righties, might provide a source of funding for creatives. There’s obviously a lot of devilry in the detail but it seems a better idea than the proposed Act.

Jim
There are many ways to reduce infringement. One of the many ways is to campaign clearly and unequivocally that it is wrong, not the half hearted “we would rather people did not infringe” or “and even enforcement has its place”.
This clear message can go along with all the other good things that you are doing.
This combined message would make much more sense of the Open Rights Group strap line “Protecting Your Rights For The Digital Age”.
At the moment the creative has no rights in the ‘digital age’.

Roger @ 10

If you had your income robbed and your chance of earning a living destroyed.

Happens everyday in this, and every Country on the globe. The usual response is to retrain for a new industry. MacDonald’s are always looking for people and you can get tax credits too. There are very few people who New Labour feels they need to protect their livelihood with powerful legislation with punitive punishments. The normal response for New Labour is to announce a code of conduct or suchlike, but non interference.

However, most people who lose their jobs when technology makes them obsolete aren’t millionaires with massive coke habits and lavish parties, so there is a moral there. If you want New Labour to care about your industry, be very rich.

Try as I might, I cannot get interested in an industry that produces multi-millionaires of some of the greediest, homophobic, sexist and most obnoxious people on the planet. An industry which produces a Simon Cowell or can afford to pay Mariah Carey millions NOT to produce albums are guilty crying wolf. Of course, most of these people leave these shore to avoid paying tax here, but the minute that their vast profits are likely to be compromised by two teenagers sending a list of 1 and 0s to each other and ‘Hey presto!’ the need for ‘Big Government’ is all too apparent!

What about this for a concept? All those people who got rich and fucked off to tax exiles to live their lives, go and pester their Government?

If it is good enough for the likes of Cowell to circumvent our tax laws, surely it should be allowed for us to buy our music from Countries that happen to have lax copyright laws?

Sly, that’s an unfortunate comment, I thought we were getting somewhere.

It is a gross exaggeration to say the artist has no rights at present. Their financial rights are well represented in increasing online license payments as noted above. Infringing file sharers can and do get taken to court. Websites can be prosecuted. The music industry has generally chose not to do so – and has in campaigning for this bill asked ISPs and government to do its job instead. But the industries have plenty of legal mechanisms.

It isn’t ORG’s job to campaign for enforcement, which threatens all kinds of unwanted consequences. Of course we want infringement to reduce. But what I am arguing is that you must do that through reforming the system. We’ve said all this above. We are beginning to repeat ourselves.

You seem to want to insist that copyright infringement is a major wrong that should be campaigned against in itself – I’m content to say it’s a wrong, like fare evasion, but exactly like fare evasion, I am interested in whether the tickets are costed correctly, if the services have competition, if schoolkids can get free passes and if they run well, rather than discussing if fare dodgers deserve to be flogged. And I will argue that the best way to reduce fare evasion is to get the ticket system right.

comment 28: Jim

thanks for your comment.

I really appreciate your sensitive and informed input here.

Roger

Jim
This is what I did say “This clear message [that its wrong] can go along with all the other good things that you are doing”
I am not asking for a campaign its own right. Simply to add my voice to your campaign.
BTW we have similar views on Cowell and Carey as well.
What I meant by ‘no rights’ was more to do with the mindset of the internet trawler not simply rights in a legal sense.
I am wondering if your clear anger at the coke snorting end of the biz will ever bring you closer to me!

Sly, different Jim @ 28!

We are clear that artists have rights, and it’s unfortunate how easily that message gets clouded in these debates. We’re clear that copyright infringement is wrong – to be honest this long discussion about what copyright is or isn’t is beyond what we think we need to discuss about this Bill. Getting into a debate about how to educate users about copyright is really, at this stage, beyond what we are trying to do. We have to focus on the civil liberties consequences of the Bill, which I know you’re concerned about too.

Oh, I accept that artists have rights; I think the difficulty arises in how exactly we administer those rights. When we used to have the old c60 tapes, we could in theory copy music as many times as we could. I had a fairly large illegally copied library of tapes in my youth. Yet no-one in the industry did not move to ban cassette recorders from the market, nor did they attempt to ban the actual blank cassettes either. No-one was ever going to be black listed from buying records for owning to many c60s.

However, the technology has moved on and it is now pretty much unstoppable. Every industry’s mantra is ‘you cannot stop progress’ which is echoed by the Government of the day as well. No job is safe from the march of technology and no technology is ever stymied to perverse jobs either.

No government would prevent offshore call centres/online banking or self service checkouts etc to preserve British jobs, yet they are willing to sit King Cannute-like to preserve this one industry? Why?

Surely the correct thing to do is move with the technology and create new business models to compete against the digital pirates? Why doesn’t the music industry invest in small/medium sized venues all over the Country in provincial towns? Given that there are bigish shops closing every high street, why not convert say all the empty Woolworths for example into 200 place venues? Let the pirates work for you? You could have a ‘Virgin’ (if you know what I mean), EMI, Sony, Indie in every town in the Country and then you’re A and R men would need to find decent bands and nurture them? Of course that would require a long term investment and long term commitment as well, something that record companies are pretty adverse to do.

“If people who file share also buy music one has to ask where all the money has gone, because a lot of musicians see none of it.”

Most never did before the internet. Largely the result of most bands signing their contracts when they were drunk, in their early 20s and not understanding what the term “recoupable advance” means.

I sent a mail to Charles Clarke MP (Norwich South) and he responded with a rather mundane “I have acknowledged your opinion” letter, but did not mention his own views on the bill.