BPI WANT MARKET BOSSES PUNISHED

The police are a little stretched right now - what with having to do all this poking about in terrorist hunting; investigating other forces when they accidently shoot the wrong people during terrorist hunts, coming up with plausible reasons why they should be allowed to drive at 160 miles an hour for the fun of it, or simply developing an evasive air when someone asks "how come nobody seemed bothered about the bloke who got stabbed in the street that time, then?"

Clearly, what they should be doing, instead of trying to cope with crime and disorder, is protecting private companies' incomes. That, at least, is what the BPI is calling for, as they issue a press release suggesting that rather than try and stop people being raped and murder, the police should be concentrating on pirate CDs being sold at carboot sales:

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) says intellectual property crime should be "higher on the police's agenda".

Of course - never mind that people might want to see police doing something about the crime and vandalism which makes their lives a misery, how can we sleep soundly at night if we don't know someone's doing something to take hookey copies of Robbie Williams albums off the street?

A survey suggests CD piracy cost the industry £165m in lost revenue in 2005 - nearly 10% of total sales.

Car boot sales and markets accounted for over a third of pirated CDs, while a quarter were bought from friends, the survey found.

The survey found that 37 million pirated CDs were sold in the UK in 2005, the value of which was more than the combined legal sales of the leading 13 albums in the UK.

It is the first time the industry has estimated the projected losses caused by pirated CDs.

Of course - and, we apologise if you read a lot of No Rock and are familiar already with the reason why this argument is at best specious - this works on the assumption that someone who buys a copy of a Beyonce album off a bloke at work for two quid would otherwise have bought it for a tenner in the shop, an assumption that just isn't true. It's a little like suggesting that every time McDonalds sells a burger for 99p, it costs Pizza Express £10 on the basis that, had his tummy not been filled by the burger, the customer would have gone and had to buy a pizza instead to fill the hole.

And, frankly, the costs of trying to stamp out piracy at thousands of stalls and workplaces in hundreds of towns to save multinational corporations a few hundred thousand quid each hardly seem worth it. Why should so much of our money be spent to try and protect Sony-BMG?

Amongst the BPI's ideas is that people who run markets where pirated CDs are sold should be punished. It's not entirely obvious what their rationale for this is - after all, they haven't been calling for the heads of record labels in the US who colluded to keep smaller labels' music off the air to be made to stand down. The BPI seems to have a crooked view of what responsibility means.

This renewed interest in physical piracy, though, could be a sign that the BPI has realised it's losing the download battle quite badly, and is trying to find a role that justifies the fee it takes from its members year after year. The download battles tend pile up bad publicity, bungles, and no noticeable change in the amount of filesharing. At least physical piracy offers the prospect of some morale-boosting footage of seized CDs being destroyed.

music bpi piracy