This month Business Secretary Peter Mandelson announced plans to disconnect filesharers from the internet for downloading illegally. This comes after heavy lobbying from the creative industries who argue that hundreds of jobs will be lost if immediate action against piracy is not taken. But digital rights groups argue that ‘disconnection without trial’ is an infringement of consumer rights, while others are demanding a radically new approach to copyright and ownership.
Who owns a song? The ownership of creative works has never been as simple as defining who owns a chair, or a building but through copyright, it was easy enough to control who distributed songs and films. If you play a song in a restaurant, you need a license from the copyright holder. More often than not, it’s a record label you’re paying, rather than the individual artist. If you record it, that’s copyright infringement. In the days of radio and a really carefully timed cassette tape, this didn’t seem to pose a problem. But copyright infringement is now being committed on a mass scale – from dads burning their Neil Diamond collection onto a CD to under-30′s downloading gigabytes of new music. Creative industry surveys put the number of downloaders at six million, although this has been disputed. Campaigners claim that the government has bowed to industry pressure – with particular focus on Peter Mandelson’s meal with the head of Universal Records, Lucian Grainge. But when consulted on alternative plans to ensure artists get paid for their work, pressure groups still disagree.
Legalise all music to be available online
Jim Killock, Open Rights Group
Criminalising the millions of filesharers who download every day is a “one-sided commercial decision”, according to Jim Killock of digital campaigners the Open Rights Group, who is one of many critics of the lobbying power of British music labels and other rightsholders.
“The rightsholders have the biggest economic stake in this problem; they’re the ones whose businesses are mostly being threatened,” he says. “So they have lobbied very hard to stiffen the measures up.” There is, he says, no room for manoeurvre for smaller new music companies, who, without years of industry legitimacy have little political weight. If they did, they might well be campaigning for a complete overhaul of licensing and the internet. According to Killock, downloading tracks off the internet for low cost “isn’t the problem. Even peer-to-peer filesharing is not the problem. The problem is that it’s happening without a licence.”
The fact that millions of us are downloading and streaming illegally every day is, in fact, something to be embraced. This is not an entirely new idea, but one which industry heavyweights have trouble embracing. Killock cites the fight between PRS and YouTube over music videos and licence fees as a recent example. “How do you get licences to the services that customers want? It’s difficult to negotiate these licenses, and they’re not on terms which are particularly good for new music industry offerings,” he says.
Such as Spotify, perhaps, which took the UK by storm this year with its free streaming music service. Killock believes that the UK economy is missing out on new businesses because of the current heavyhanded approach. ORG’s solution is the compulsory collective licensing – forcing rightsholders to issue a kind of blanket license to all internet users via their ISP’s, at a standard price which compensates rightsholders and artists.
Keep the status quo
For the UK Pirate Party, this approach is too complex. “[UK] laws are very, very messy,” says its leader, Andrew Robinson. “No one really knows where they stand, and we need something much simpler.” He points out one Conservative MP who thought burning a CD of copyrighted music was legal. “No one knows where they stand with our legislation.”
The answer?
“File-sharing should be legalised. It does reward artists, because people get to find out about music they’d never have heard of. People will find ways of supporting the bands they love,” says Robinson. “Our country is in a flap over starting up, and people aren’t sure that they can do without a record company to get them started. We need to get over that, and get to the point where artists think ‘well, maybe I’ll only sell a 20th of what I would but I’ll still making the same amount of money.’” Like Killock, he argues that rightsholders need to relinquish control, but also that artists can embrace filesharing as free marketing without the need of record labels.
“With that kind of free advertising, anyone can make it big,” says Robinson. “If you look at the top 40 hits, are they really from the top 40 artists, or are they just the best marketed? It’s far from a meritocracy.”
Surely it would be better all round to allow services like Spotify to legitimise online content? Robinson is sceptical. “I would be very careful about falling into the new business model and YouTube trap. I’ve spent a good five or six hours trying to find out how much artists are actually paid by services like Spotify, but nobody is saying anything. It’s a tiny amount of money, and some say they are ripped off.”
What next?
The filesharing consultation closes today, but Jim Killock thinks it may be some time before the laws are adjusted to satisfy both rightsholders and the public. “You see the beginnings of this discussion in other countries, from Canada to the EU. But companies are very entrenched, especially in France, the UK and Spain. You’ve got large rightsholder industries in Europe who dominate the debate and slow everything down.”
What the artists say
“My generation grew up with the point of view that you pay for your music. Every generation has a different method. File sharing is like a sampler, like taping your mate’s music. You go, ‘I like that, I’ll go and buy the album’. Or, ‘you know what, I’ll go and see them live’. What’s going on is a huge paradigm shift.”
Ed O’Brien, Radiohead.
“The fact that file sharing goes on, and is as popular as it is, is an incredibly positive thing for the music industry. The fact is that music is so popular that people are willing to break the law to get it. Can you have a big red button that Peter Mandelson can press and the problem goes away? No. You’re on the back foot constantly.”
Dave Rowntree, Blur
“I think if you can afford to buy a record then you should buy it. People who hunt down a record and download it for free will probably talk it up. They are the unsung word-of-mouthers who spread the word and create tipping point situations for a greedy record business that has got so fat it is unable to see its own footsoldiers.”
Fran Healy, Travis
“I think music piracy is having a dangerous effect on British music, but some really rich and successful artists like Nick Mason from Pink Floyd and Ed O’Brien from Radiohead don’t seem to think so.”
Lily Allen
[...] If Facebook fans were votes… Posted on September 17, 2009 by shonaghosh During his interview with Surveillance News yesterday, UK Pirate Party leader Andrew Robinson was chuffed to have [...]
the laws need to be clearer so downloaders can be sure what exactly it is they are doing wrong