Leaving aside the extremely hard-line nature of Peter Mandelson’s proposals for a crackdown on illegal file sharing, there is a more fundamental question about what the impact of illegal file sharing really is on the music industry. To what extent does the distribution of songs this way take money away from sales and to what extent does it act as a free form of publicity, which triggers purchases and income from other streams such as concerts and merchandise?
Take this recent report from The Times:
Lily Allen condemned artists who have spoken out against the[Government’s] proposals.
Allen, in a lengthy posting on her blog, criticised “rich and successful artists” such as Ed O’Brien, of Radiohead, and Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer, [who] told The Times that file-sharing had some beneficial effects for artists.
The pair, part of the Featured Artists Coalition, which opposes plans by Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, to temporarily disconnect those who repeatedly flout the law, said that the government plans would criminalise young people.
O’Brien said: “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.”
So as a follow up to the clip with Nick Clegg’s views on the matter, here is one musician’s musical riposte to Lily Allen:
(You can also watch the clip on YouTube here.)
Hat-tip: Mark Evans
34 Comments
Help, but “filesharing” is really a pointless argument. Services like Spotify eliminate the need to illegally download music to sample it. Lily Allen even has vast swaves of her music on there, all free to listen to.
Huw: that’s a fair point. The question is about access, either through downloading a file or through streaming it.
Mark: I can tell you from personal experience that those factors are not tightly tied together. They do not influence one another in the fashion suggested – some bands play loads of gigs and can’t sell records, some bands are the opposite. My project killed as much filesharing for our album as possible and sold past expectations, what we learnt is you can’t lose a sale to freetards, but some people will buy if they find it hard to download.
Huw: Spotify has yet to turn a profit, so we’re yet to see whether it is a successful business model. Spotify isn’t free, it’s paid for by advertising and, interestingly enough, has reverted to the traditional model this week by selling MP3 directly from the interface. I’m a big fan of it and hope that it works out, but there are no certainties in this market, apart from its temporary nature.
If Spotify has “eliminate the need to illegally download music to sample it” (sounds ideal!), you must surely agree to tougher sanctions against people doing so? You’re essentially saying they have no excuse any more – which is what was initially said in the other thread.
Lets not forget that file sharing isn’t just an issue for musicians, it’s an issue for anyone producing digital content for any market. An unregulated free-for-all threatens the software, movie and videogame industries just as much as music, and many of the solutions being proposed simply can’t be applied to those other industries even if they are valid to some extent for musicians.
As a guy I know likes to say, streaming is just downloading followed by deleting. It’s an irrelevant distinction. If you are “streaming”, then you are downloading.
I don’t think it really matters whether filesharing helps or hinders sales. Sharing and copying are fundamental elements of our culture, and trying to ban them is illiberal, while trying to tax them proportionately is a money-wasting exercise since it costs more to monitor than the revenue generated (while also being a gratuitous invasion of privacy), and trying to force sharing behaviour into easily taxed patterns is just a more subtle form of banning.
You might as well debate whether the police DNA and fingerprint databases help or hinder investigations – it doesn’t really matter, because the big issues with them are the cost and the intrusion on individual liberty. Much like file sharing, the actual effectiveness is quite small, but we should not become focussed on that detail.
“I don’t think it really matters whether filesharing helps or hinders sales…”
Err, it matters a great deal to those producing the content that’s being stolen. Sorry, “shared”.
Yes, people are breaking into your house and taking away all your precious content so that you can never sell it again. The thieves!
Does anybody else remember how we got the exact same argument about the DNA database? “It’s important to the victims of crime!” The parallel is growing increasingly striking.
“Yes, people are breaking into your house and taking away all your precious content so that you can never sell it again. The thieves!
OK genius, then riddle me this:
I write software for a living. If that software is available for free on bittorrent then what incentive does the consumer have to pay for it?
And if the answer to that is “no incentive”, then what incentive do I have to write any more software?
“I write software for a living. If that software is available for free on bittorrent then what incentive does the consumer have to pay for it?”
I give money to charity but I don’t have to. I’m a member of the Lib Dems when I don’t need to be. The incentive is that it was good software and the filesharer wants to support you writing more.
You can’t be a liberal and think the worst of people.
Huw: it’s not just about altruism. Providing software for free can also be a route to earning money by other means. The biggest example of that is Google – they give away their toolbar, they don’t charge for using their search engine – and they are hugely profitable. They’re by no means the only example either. Flickr is a different example, where for most users it is free but enough want to pay for extra services to make the overall system profitable.
I’ve been buying much more music since I started downloading file-sharing tunes. It’s that simple.
“You can’t be liberal and think the worst of people.”
Can you be liberal if you have more than a tenuous grip on reality?
Having trouble posting here :
Huw
>You can’t be a liberal and think the worst of people.
You can when they’re stealing from you and they don’t even concede that it’s theft.
Mark
I see you’re back to free here – let’s clear free up, because it’s irritating. THERE IS NO FREE – YOU ARE NOT USING HONEST LANGUAGE. You don’t mean free at all, you mean : PAID FOR BY ADVERTISING REVENUE. Google is far from free, its found an unintrusive way of delivering you ad’s, so, what you’re actually saying is :
People that make music, software, tv or film, authors, designers, architects, AutoCAD workers, scientists, etc; give your work away free and get paid by Google Adwords!
It makes our creative output secondary and subservient to advertisers. If you don’t see how your suggestions lead to economic slavery then I don’t think you understand your own model. At the moment our collective work goes into the UK economy, where we pay tax on it, etc, your suggestion leaves the bulk of the cash to Fortune 500 companies. You want to give the UK economy away as advertising to an American corporation – where do we make that revenue from once its gone?
Google does not pay parity with the traditional streams, far, far from it; your model doesn’t make any sense. If I sell 1000 records/CDs I make roughly about £1000, if I get 1000 hits/ad clicksthrough on Google or Youtube it’s worth roughly £7 to me. Also, click revenues are falling faster that sales of traditional media , so your suggestions would make for a much less stable economy, because you’re wiping out product that traditionally hedges sales during a recession, in favour of revenue streams that are much less resilient to economic downturns. Why on earth would anyone want to do this?!!!
This is ecologically, economically, socially and politically terrible thinking. We don’t need to become slaves to big business, we just need less people like you trying to give everything away for free! I think you’d be shocked as to how little revenue, prospects and stability your ideas bring in real life to real people, and how stultifying they are in terms of creativity – you should interview Dan Bull and ask him about his revenue streams, how he keeps going…
To keep arguing your point, you need to provide some numbers and demonstrate practically how your suggestions could be implemented without bankrupting an artist or changing their product fundamentally. You’re swapping pounds for pence and don’t really seem to be aware of the discrepancy. You use huge corporations that have offset millions of dollars in losses over years and years as examples, but our creative industries would be bankrupt years before turning profitable within these markets. You just seem to have a poor grip on the realities of this situation – it’s about putting food on the table for me and about fantasy revenue streams for you.
Krz: What’s with this block capitals screaming that I’m not being “honest” about my use of the word free?
It’s just the same as with “free newspapers” which are delivered through everyone’s doors in an area. Everyone calls them “free” newspapers even though they are paid for via advertising. They’re free in the sense that you don’t pay someone for the paper in the way that you do for papers from the newsagent. Everyone calls them “free”: the people who receive them, the people who work for them, the people who own them.
If you want to deploy capital letters at dawn to label the rest of the population as dishonest for calling such papers “free” that’s your choice. But don’t be too surprised if it doesn’t work at convincing people…!
the artist has to get paid from the internet via subscription, advertising, sponsorship or a mix of business models.
yes, promotion is part of it but people must pay something for ‘free usage’.
the easiest way is just like skytv and to have a subscription charge added to the isp or mobile phone fee per month. then a system is set up so that a fair recompense is paid based on numbers of downloads.
simple….the isp’s and mobile companies have shafted artists for 20 years now and it sucks
Mark,
Sorry for the screaming block capitals, you just don’t seem to acknowledge that media that is paid for by advertising is distorted in an unpleasant way, and that the funding model fundamentally changes the result. Also, you keep recommending it as a replacement for the traditional industry, yet you won’t demonstrate how that could work – instead you give us Dan Bull and free newspapers; excellent examples of lower-quality media, funded by advertising.
Most people call them free newspapers because they’re not in the middle of a debate about media funding – the fundamental of your argument is “pay for music with third party adverts”; in this context it is dishonest to call this funding free – that is one of the very things we’ve been arguing about, and yet you still use the term when you mean “paid for by advertising”; you have done this since your first post on this topic, and doesn’t help comprehension of the topic – you are misleading people by using a euphemism for your method, instead of telling them what it entails – once again, your examples are not free, they are paid for by advertising. Calling them free makes it sound like we can have something for nothing, and that is the very thinking that started this problem. Whilst people were conscious of what they were doing, filesharing was a positive asset to the music industry, but now through euphemism and hearsay arguments people actually think these things are free. Your “free” newspapers are seldom considered “proper” newspapers – they’re just adverts with a splash of info.
The problem with your free examples is they’re usually of such low quality they couldn’t be considered replacement media – they’re just adverts, so your argument suggests we write off our creative industries in favour of advertising. I think this is completely insane and condemn our creative industries to a life of slavery at the hands of American corporations.
wow, just read this.. looks like the liberals are off on another planet with this issue. has the party got a policy about it or are these just opinions, becuase some of the things said seems pretty strange??? never realised liberal democrats were pro-filesharing, makes me wonder why the pirate party uk didn ‘t just join you guys! im an “inventor” of sorts and make money from licencing patents, so you wont be getting my vote next year with views like these, im a bit shocked because our MP told us on the doorstep that she didn’t support this kind of thing, so whats the parties position on it?
Sorry to join this thread so late. Just stumbled onto it, and it’s made a fascinating read.
@Mark Pack, it’s really funny – I find myself telling people the same things you’re advocating here on these threads. However, there’s a rather crucial difference. I’m a marketeer, encouraging people who want to take risks, with ideas for connecting to their markets in novel ways. You, however, are representing a party, and able to influence policy. It simply isn’t your place to promote these ideas, as fun as they are, as the new norm. Your role is, I’m afraid, to support the existing industries as best you can. While it’s certainly true that musicians can explore alternative routes for self-promotion, to suggest that the entire culture of British musicians MUST do so is dangerously beyond your
remit. You would, in effect, be asking the entire IP-generating industry to exist in a state of jeopardy, wrestling with a market dynamic that few understand well, and no-one yet understands fully. I admire your enthusiasm. Chaps like Anderson and Godin really do earn their crust by inspiring excitement and enthusiasm about the “new market dynamics”, but as someone who plans to influence policy, it behooves you to treat their ideas in context – and particularly in the context of those who you represent.
I’ll freely concede I’ve repeated the same statement three times over in the paragraph above, but I feel it’s essential to drive the point home as to what your perspective is required to be. Also, for the sake of intellectual charity, please do concede to @Krz that he is not off-side in asking you to be more transparent in your choice of terminology. It costs you nothing, and will do wonders to help the layman to understand the point you are making.
If you’ll allow me, I’d like to digress momentarily on the role that “Free” actually plays in modern marketing, since I feel the point is painfully crucial here. First we must partially except Venture Capital, which is naturally a risk-taking exercise. I say partially, since there WAS a bubble in which it was assumed that anything could be monetized. We are all, I hope, aware that this bubble burst a little while ago, and that doorway is now shut.
In marketing: “In business, nothing is free, until monetization is guaranteed”. You’re certainly free to invest your time in attempting to collect eyeballs, and hope that you can later find some way to turn that reputation into cash; however, that can’t be called a business, since there’s no plan, no investment with related returns. In business, we have risk and return. We calculate risk, and evaluate the probable and possible returns. If you decide to give something away for free, you know exactly how you’re intending to generate revenue from that. If not, you’re not in business. You can have no expectation (here in the statistical sense, allowing the pun) of a return, without a concrete strategy.
The random selection of successful ventures do not imply an industry.
Now we’ve had a little walk through the implication and connotation of the premises you’ve been proposing, consider this question: What percentage of musicians have this insight or perspective on their art?
As a further question, consider: Would you want musicians to have to have this insight or perspective, or would you prefer they concentrate on creative output?
If you’re paying attention, you’ll see that the second question is what led naturally to the creation of the “music business” as it’s called today.
Downloading is damaging the current incarnation of the music business, and, in turn, the artists. We run the risk that the artists – who are a great resource and a great asset to our country – will find their occupations untenable.
Please do correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that Southern Ireland offers tax breaks for artists.
Suggesting that artists should divert their attentions to studying marketing doesn’t seem like a fair alternative.
@Huw Dawson, I do admire your faith in people. Sadly, however, that’s not what’s in question here; this discussion concerns purchasing patterns, not human goodness. Sadly, ten years of software history demonstrates that “free” software is not a profitable exercise. People need incentives to donate. The customer, as she stands today, simply does not have the mindset that she should contribute to support development of further software. If that were the case, the FSF would be a profoundly wealthy organisation.
@MBoy Cheers for you! If you were representative of the market, there would be no need for conversation.
Interesting points DG, particularly about the remit of government/policy. But doesn’t the same point apply the other way round, i.e. why should they all be about maintaining existing business models?
@Mark Pack, sadly I can’t say it does apply the other way around.
If you intend to be Liberal, you don’t get to dictate what business models people use.
Conversely, if you had policy to support and encourage new models, without impeding those who don’t intend to change their business strategy on your whim, I would be extremely interested to study and discuss!
We are in the middle of a transition between business models. This transition was long overdue, and the old business model was well out of date. However, the old business model made a small number of people a vast amount of money (and quite a few people a bit of money), and as such it is unsurprisingly that the vested interests in the old business model are doing everything they can to try to save it and resist the tide. Large chunks of the media industry are now irrelevant, and it really isnt surprising that they dont like that.
It’s important to remember that the only reason that you can buy tunes online for very small amounts of money is because of file-sharing. That is a simple fact. If Napster hadnt been invented, or a similar clone, we would still be paying £16 plus a decade of inflation for a CD of music. It is only the advent of filesharing that challenged and exposed the grotesque amount of excess profit that the media “industry” (not artists) was creaming off of the sale of music that has forced a change of any of that. Not so long ago, as little as 5% of the cost of a CD was going to the artist. Those days are over.
However, we are not yet in the new business model – we are between models. We are in the period of anarchy between regimes; and yes it does hurt some people. It’s often unfortunate to be around during a time of revolution. However, what will come in the future will be much better than what was in the past, and we just need to hang in there until the new regime is fully born. Those who say that the current anarchy means we should go back to the old model are utterly wrong. Just as anarchy of revolution should not put people off trying to overthrow tyranny to find a better type of government, so this music anarchy shouldnt put people off the chance off a better music model.
Dont be taken in by the sophistry of those who are desperately trying to protect the sprawling tentacles of their beloved beast. The model of the future will be hugely better for all artists, and is not far away now. Filesharing is a form of civil disobedience that is challenging the establishment and forcing change. When change is fully won, that disobedience must stop, and right-thinking people will argue such. Until that time, those who paint all file-sharers as common thieves are only making themselves vast numbers of young enemies – if they spent the same amount of effort working on the future business model we probably would have been there by now…
@Mark Wright in many ways, I agree with your perspective.
I’d never propose we ‘return’ to the ‘old ways’; in fact I actively encourage people to pursue new models.
Although it’s higher risk, the potential rewards are equally much greater.
All I have to say on this is that we DON’T have the solution just yet.
That being the case, it’s not the right of the Lib Dem party to obstruct current business; it’s the duty of the party to support business and indeed, to continue to do so when the new models become apparent.
DG, the question of whether politicians should ever encourage civil disobedience is a sensitive one. I’m not aware that any Lib Dem politician has ever said “Dont buy, just download”, and I wouldnt support that tactic either. However, I think several have publicly said that those who download are not “common thieves”, and I would support that.
This is a wider moral question of course – Nick Clegg has said he will not comply with the future law on ID cards, as have several other MPs. We in the free world regularly encourage those under despotic regimes to break the law and protest for more freedoms. We even condone armed rebellion. The latter of course is now a criminal offence in the UK thanks to Blair’s wonderful Terrorism Act.
You are right we dont have the solution yet, but “the industry” is still lashing out at its own potential customers, rather than working with them. The continued insistence on “region versioning” of DVDs and other such marketing rubbish like that is indication that if you give them an inch they will still take a mile. I fear some big players in the industry are their own worst enemy. Possibly the solution wont come until the old guard are retired off. I hope not, because that would take years, and artists deserve a workable model ASAP.
DG: I think we’ve got too many negatives in our different comments to be completely clear, but I think we agree 🙂
Mark: your point about too many people lashing out rather than wanting to work with people is an important one.
Please forgive me for rehashing an earlier point in greater detail; I feel it may have been lost.
@Mark Pack, you may be right, and I’d dearly love for us to be on the same page with this. Please have a read and let me know!
@Mark Wright, whilst I greatly endorse the sentiment of your postings, whereby you aim to support the artists (in this debate I side very strongly with @Krz’s idea that this country has a unique and wonderful resource of musicians and creatives), I fear that the language you use has imprecisions that lead to inappropriate generalisations. From that standpoint, I’d like to discuss where we are regarding “new models”.
iTMS (iTunes Music Store) is a record store. It still charges around £7 for a record (compare with the average £12 in shops), although it has reduced the price of a single from around £2.50 to about £1.60. There’s nothing new in the iTMS model; the price control was driven by Rapaillian good sense (can’t charge as much if there’s nothing you can hold), but principally the fact that the store was effectively first to market (since it was integrated with iPod, which was and is market leader). The dominance of iTMS came from timing and integration, and the pricing was forced by that muscle.
You can point to many similar examples of mp3 shops – Beatport, 7digital, etc, and there’s really nothing new at all. When you consider that “real” record shops will order obscure recordings on demand, you might take the perspective that Anderson’s long tail results from the immediacy of online stores, rather than anything else.
Spotify gets misunderstood, and that’s certainly from the imprecision of language. Spotify is an internet radio station. It shares its model with radio stations the world over – either they’re subsidised, or they sell adverts.
Of course, with Spotify, every user has their own radio station which takes requests. To understand how artists make money from radio, you need to understand the operating methods of the PRS. The PRS has been around for 95 years.
To summarise, there’s still nothing resembling a “new” model.
Artists have always tried to supplement their income by touring, but that’s simply not applicable in some cases. For instance, this country has, and needs, good songwriters. Good songwriters are not by any necessity, good performers. Nor ought we demand them to be.
These “new internet things” integrate wholly with the “old ways”, and there’s really no hint nor clue as to what a new model might be. Some of us have a close eye on the matter, but none of the examples in common discussion are anywhere close to “new”. They’re the old, modernised and more convenient.
Downloading hurts iTMS and Spotify directly.
Insisting that artists adapt to the “new models”, in the absence of any sign of such ideas, and when it clearly ought not to be their primary focus, is wholly dangerous.
I think the “new model” will be more than just a snazzy electronic distribution mechanism. The number of people going to festivals has rocketed in recent years, and fans increasingly want to see their musicians live – so there is money to be made there. While electronic distribution has – in theory – made life much easier for musicians to get their music “out there”, the fans of the future also demand that artists tour festivals and venues, which I admit makes life a bit harder for artists but ought to be fun to! Artists should probably also be less snobby about licensing their music for commercial use. Thus the “new model” is likely to be a multi-pronged way of making money.
As an aside I think that some of the file-sharing criticism from small artists comes from a viewpoint that appears to say that the internet should have made it easier to get rich from music, and yet it is as difficult as ever to do so. The reality is that the ever greater number of people wanting to make it as musicians was always going to make it more difficult for individuals to break through. If artists thought that they could just record some music and then let the cash roll in they were always going to be disappointed.
@mark pack
>why should they all be about maintaining existing business models?
I find it hard to believe someone interested in politics doesn’t know why politicians should maintain the countries existing revenue streams. The answer is : this is where the money comes from. This is paying for the NHS, politicians, the BBC, the police, etc, etc. That’s why governments protect their industries – they need the money to pay for things, this is how things work.
@mark wright
You talk of the “new” model, but you don’t know what it is.
The “old” model is dead apparently, you can’t prove it but you’re sure that’s a fact.
Then, somewhat ironically, you call unspecified other people sophists!!
>The number of people going to festivals has rocketed in recent years
Live receipts are down this year after a long period of growth, but musicians always have and always will make money from gigs – this is not a new revenue stream, in fact, it’s probably the very first revenue stream.
>Artists should probably also be less snobby about licensing their music for commercial use
They rarely are and rarely have been. This has not changed for the past 40 years, there’s just more licensing opportunities now with better global distribution. Again this is old model, there is absolutely nothing new about this, in all these years I’ve only met 1 person “snobby” regarding licensing…coincidentally he’d also made the most from music. So – you’re all in favour of copyright protectionism and musicians earning through licensing, but you don’t like sales of music in discrete units? What sort of messed up logic is this?! Where is your “old” and “new” now?! I suspect it’s with Mark’s “Free”, Anderson’s “longtail” and those dudes that said the world would end at the millennium.
>The reality is that the ever greater number of people wanting to make it as
>musicians was always going to make it more difficult for individuals to break through.
…and this isn’t true either. I’m completely underwhelmed by the number of new artists now compared to a decade ago. Anyone that was in the UK early 90’s doing music will testify to the sheer size of new artists, labels, distributors and musical scenes. This isn’t about people looking to “get rich”, this about being paid for something you have created, proportional to the number of users/listeners/viewers/readers/etc.
Also, you neglect to mention the dozens of other industries that have digitally replicatable product. Why are you focused exclusively on music for this? Why not software, CAD creations, TV, film, books, 3D modelling, IP, etc, etc? It’s all the same – you don’t have replacement revenue, all you have is the idea there is a “new” way and that is replacing the “old” way. In reality, you’re simply writing off a significant proportion of our economy because you fail to understand it.
>”The model of the future will be hugely better for all artists, and is not far away now. ”
From everything you’ve written, you hardly seem a reliable source on this matter, how can we trust your crystal ball? This “model of the future” – will it apply to absolutely all digitally replicable media? DG’s point about you willing the “old” industry out of existence, whilst failing to realise that it is a fundamental of the economy is a very good one. Why do you show so much contempt for the very industries that have maintained this countries economy through the downturn?? I always thought political parties were in favour of industry…that’s where the country gets its money from, but anyone reading what has been written above can see that isn’t the case for the Lib Dems. This is the first time I’ve seen a political party argue against part of the countries own revenue – you are cursing the ground you stand upon and acting as though there’s no relationship between you and it.
LibDem Protip : Nobody that makes anything would live in a country governed by people with your views on the security of their product.
What an absurd rant. Presumably “Krz” thinks that nobody makes anything in China where even the state openly flouts copyright law…
@MBoy name your top ten Chinese musicians. Sorry, no, I’m just being flippant. How does your comment actually relate to this discussion?
Krz: I deliberately said “all” about, which is very different from the point you went on to rubbish. Saying policies shouldn’t be all about preserving current business models isn’t the same as saying they should all be junked.
I think a government whose approach was “we must keep everything always the same as it currently is” would be far from successful or attractive. Freeze all industries in their current forms forever? Not only would that be the road to economic ruin, it would also be the road to artistic stagnation given how much artistic creativity comes from change.
That’s my view, but what’s your view? Is there any change in the music industry that you think is necessary or desirable? I ask as your response to pretty much everyone else seems to be to knock any possible hint of change. Is it that you think the current state of the music industry is as it should be for all time?
DG: My favourite Chinese artist is Sa Ding Ding – I recommend her muchly. My comment was a direct response to Krz’s “Nobody that makes anything would live in a country governed by people with your views on the security of their product”. It’s self-evidently true that lots of people who make stuff live in China.
@Mark: You wrote above…
Is there an asymmetry here? If government bans unlicensed filesharing, individual artists are able to choose for themselves to make their work freely available and so benefit from the new business models outlined above. If government allows unlicensed filesharing, individual artists cannot choose to require downloaders to pay for the work.
Hey Mark
There are changes I’d like to see, the idea that this is a transitional phase to something else may well hold water – but everyone’s talking like something else has already happened, it hasn’t. Everything we’re seeing now is part of the traditional paradigm (except perhaps Spotify, streaming services), what is new is the ease/convenience of piracy. It used to take the best part of an hour to dub a tape off, and even copying CDs takes longer than many really like to spend messing around. MP3’s are different, it takes longer to write ID3 tags than it does download an album now. At the moment this activity is illegal in the UK – yet you maintain that we shouldn’t enforce the law, so do you think the law is wrong? Where is the line? Is it OK for me to hack into the offices of British inventors, take their AutoCAD files and sell them to Chinese manufacturers? Should I be prosecuted for doing so?
I think the law is right, and is holding up an awful lot of our country. To weaken it would weaken us greatly – to not enforce it makes a mockery of it. If you justify stealing from me, then I can justify stealing from you, it’s the start of a slippery slope. The non-interventionist, laissez-faire approach to economic matters has already cost us one economic meltdown, yet you’re arguing that ground here.
You have to choose whether you think it is right to protect IP holders from individual piracy. In our society it’s generally accepted that we need to protect and maintain IP, in the East they have a different view. I’ve thought about this for years, because it goes against my instincts, but the more people I meet that make things, the more I’m convinced of the need – I can’t see why anyone would do anything in your free-for-all, and waiting for Mark Wrights “new model” has been a long decade, could be a long century for all we know.
As mentioned earlier, we’re at a point now where ISPs log all our electronic communication – I’d like the obvious IP addresses filtered, and people downloading vast quantities of new music to be stopped, firstly through cease and desist notices, secondly through small fines and thirdly through disconnection. If you don’t have the stomach for protecting the property of others, you have no right to governance – it’s fundamental to politics. Since technology is now legally obliged to be ready for such a scenario, it seems silly as a society to say “it’s OK to pirate IP in the UK”, because creators will gravitate towards countries that offer them protection. Having a society in which pirating IP is acceptable will lead us to a dependency on strong IP nations, as is the case with China; I can’t see why anyone in the developing world would argue towards us following the Chinese on these issues.
Rather than talk about managing this period and protecting the industries effected by it, you and Mark Wright have chosen to proceed along the lines of “there are other ways of doing this”, “the old way is dead”, etc, etc, without substantive examples and ignoring the lack of “real” alternatives for creatives (a retail book about Free and Dan Bull are not alternatives, they demonstrate the flaws in your argument perfectly). This isn’t helping anyone, it merely condemns the UK economy and in all this time has given us absolutely nothing in terms of concrete suggestions to maintain our creative industries – indeed, there seems to be a prevailing view from the Lib Dems in these threads that the big evil music industry has brought this on itself, which shows a poor level of comprehension on the topic :
“90% of PPL’s 42,000 members earn less than £15,000 a year from music.” – The Guardian
If you don’t have anything concrete enough to lay an economy on, I suggest you protect what we have at the moment as well as possible until alternative provision has been made. Don’t think that because we’re talking about music that this doesn’t apply to much of the tertiary and quaternary sectors of our economy.
I’m glad you agreed with DG though – that was quite an admission! He seems to mostly agree with me. 🙂
As a comic aside, that’s clearly quite serious :
http://freetail.tumblr.com/post/160156593/is-free-killing-the-porn-industry
MBoy
As I’m sure you’re aware, most development and IP work carries on outside of China. We invent it, they manufacture it – inventors (musicians, filmmakers, etc, etc) don’t fair so well in China, here they can become Gods of industry. The reason for this is, as you stated, their lack of IP law. My language was imprecise here, but I’m sure you understood what was meant. Clearly there is large-scale industrial piracy in China, and that doesn’t help us either.
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[…] These views chime with the instincts of Nick Clegg when I asked him about this at the party’s Bournemouth Conference. He was hostile to the Government’s preferred route of disconnecting people from the internet and instead talked about the need to find alternative ways of allowing artists and authors to earn a living. This view has also been backed by some in the music industry. […]
[…] These views chime with the instincts of Nick Clegg when I asked him about this at the party’s Bournemouth Conference. He was hostile to the Government’s preferred route of disconnecting people from the internet and instead talked about the need to find alternative ways of allowing artists and authors to earn a living. This view has also been backed by some in the music industry. […]