UK ISPs blocking licenced material

Have you come across The Promo Bay yet? It's a spin-off from The Pirate Bay activities, where artists across a range of endeavours submit their content, willingly and happily, in the hope of being picked up for wider exposure.

Except they're not getting the exposure, in the UK at least, because UK ISPs are blocking them. TorrentFreak reports:

Promo Bay’s Will Dayble believes his site has ended up on some of the ISPs’ blocklists “by accident”.

“These providers are pretty monolithic and old school, I’d imagine it’s just a broad-scale block against a bunch of Pirate Bay properties and we fell under the net. I doubt it’s a pointed move against the Promo Bay in particular,” Dayble tells TorrentFreak.

But that would imply that blocking - far from being the scalpel-like weapon it's claimed to be - is like a blunderbuss strapped to a hammer.

The Pirate Bay blocking is at the behest of the BPI, who claim to be doing it in the interests of copyright holders. But their block is interfering with other copyright holders' rights to distribute their material as they choose.

Pirates repelled

The BPI has won a historic High Court judgement forcing UK ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay.

This isn't great news - the idea of access to any website being blocked on the say-so of a cartel run by three-and-a-half multinational organisations would always be an affront to natural justice - but, obviously, the BPI are delighted:

BPI's chief executive Geoff Taylor said: "The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale.

"Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them.

"This is wrong - musicians, sound engineers and video editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else."

Geoff Taylor must know, in his heart, that this isn't a win, though. It's not even locking a stable door after the horses have bolted; it's turning up at stables that have long since been turned into holiday homes and putting up a 'No bolting' sign.

Not a single extra penny will find its way to a sound engineer as a result of this; the only people making money are lawyers. So much effort still being poured into a policy that failed in the early days of the century.

UK ISPs consider buying coach, horses for new copyright, data retention laws

Increasing legal demands for ISPs to monitor what their customers are up to on the internet seem to be a waste of time, as some UK ISPs are planning to keep within the letter of the rules but in such a way as there'll be nothing much to record. Adrian Kennard of AAISP explained to ISPReview why use of Virtual Private Networks and Network Address Translation makes the demands of the law meaningless:

"There are, of course, a whole string of loop holes.

I doubt you need to go to VPN as such. In fact, something ISPs will be doing anyway, carrier grade NAT, will create a similar anonymity as there is no requirement to log NAT sessions.

The data retention stuff is badly drafted and only means keeping what you already process for a year, not logging and new stuff. Even then it is a very narrow set of things to log, and some are badly worded at best. It is much more relevant for telephone call logging.

The DEA is the bigger issue. So far OFCOM say it will relate to the few big ISPs, but that threshold could so easily change, hence interest from ISPs of all sizes."

Trefor Davies of Timico isn't convinced that VPN will work:

"It would be a pretty costly project for all ISPs to implement such a system. It would also bring with it risks – suddenly it becomes a lot easier for governments to start monitoring all your traffic because it all goes through a single point (or at least a few points) on the network. In the UK the Data Protection Act if applied to an ISP would also prevent them from offering such an anonymizing service because legally they would be obliged to provide the logs."

There's an obvious irony in the law designed to protect our data privacy could end up undermining our privacy, but the good news is that some ISPs, at least, are working with their customers instead of against them. As Egypt is demonstrating again this weekend, an internet which exists only to do what the government lets it is an internet that works against democracy.

Guardian columnist calls for UK ISPs to be overseen by foreign courts

There's another clunking piece by Helienne Lindvall on the MediaGuardian website following the failure of the Pirate Bay appeal.

Helienne spots that the court judgement against The Pirate Bay doesn't really make much difference, because the search engine has just moved its base from Scandinavia to the Far East. Rather than think 'hmm, that means that taking an approach which tries to just close Pirate Bay down which turns into a massive game of whack-a-mole wasting time and resources which could be better used in other ways', Lindvall's response is that what is needed is just more legal sanction.

After all, a Swedish court can only deal with crimes committed within its jurisdiction.

Up to point. If there is a desire for a national court to deal with alleged crimes which take place outside its boundaries, then laws can be drafted to that effect - for example, this has happened with sex tourism crimes.

I agree with Per Strömbäck of the Swedish thinktank Netopia when he says intermediaries such as internet service providers have to take more responsibility. Once a court has established that a site is committing illegal activities, the ISPs should have a duty to block that site, using technical methods that are similar to those used to protect against viruses, so that it wouldn't be an invasion of personal privacy. Without the co-operation of the ISPs and other intermediaries, even a conviction by the supreme court is toothless when it comes to the internet.

You could argue that an ISP should obey the injunctions of its home court, but what Hel is after is for ISPs to block access to websites which have been found guilty of "illegal activities".

Earlier on in her piece, Lindvall attacks the Bay team for responding to complaints in childish terms, and then she goes on to float this idea which sounds like something out of a Newsround debate.

A foreign court says that a website does something illegal, so it must be blocked automatically by an ISP.

So, say, a court in a nation which has made homosexuality illegal finds a health site "guilty" for its safer sex advice - BT would be forced to block that in the UK.

A totalitarian government's puppet courts finds Google guilty of sedition for linking to opposition parties? Talk Talk would be obliged to row-in and slap a block on the site.

It's somewhat unpleasant, and plainly absurd. Unless all Lindvall means is that she wants ISPs to sometimes block some sites which are found guilty of some crimes in some states. Which is alright in principle - why not try and come up with a list, and think about seeing if you can find an MP to introduce legislation, rather than calling on telecommunications companies to act as censors?

Of course, it'd be a waste of time. Even if UK ISPs were obliged to comply with Swedish court rulings on matters of copyright, how would a legally-enforceable block on the Swedish Pirate Bay also apply to the 'new' Pirate Bay overseas? They've moved to a place where they're not behaving illegally - so would an ISP be somehow obliged to block a website that hasn't been found guilty of any crime in the place where it's located?

Or would the fact that this is the Pirate Bay, which has been convicted elsewhere, be enough to trigger a ban?

But what if they'd reopened not as The Pirate Bay, but, say, Long John Silver's Website? Would the organisation being the same be enough to trigger the block?

So how about if the ownership details changed slightly? Say, to the owner's cousins?

Would the ISPs then be somehow supposed to block access to a site operating legally on its home territory, run by unconvicted people, under a different brand?

Wherever you stand on the moral question, it's clear that such an approach cannot work.

Lindvall finishes with this:

But, more importantly, the question is: how do we protect the individual's legal rights when corporations, such as many ISPs, refuse to take any responsibility for what goes through their pipes? Till we deal with that issue, I'm afraid legal convictions, such as this one, mean very little.

Copyright is very important to some people. Fair enough. But a much more important principle is that ISPs should not be held accountable for what goes through "their pipes" - because we don't want BT to get sued for the thoughts of their customers; we don't want TalkTalk deciding to not to carry certain traffic because they'd be treated as a publisher rather than a dumb pipe.

However urgently you believe that making a few more quid for Chris Martin is vital, that idea - that the responsibility for what appears online should belong to the people putting it online, not the people who run the infrastructure - is much, much important.

If Helienne Lindvall believes that the operators of the M6 toll should be stopping lorries carrying counterfeit CDs from driving up its roadway, then her views would at least be consistent. But I think she'd admit that is a crazy idea, and the only result would be lorries taking different routes while everyone else is inconvenienced and frustrated. Why can't she see the metaphor holds just as firmly online?

Peter Jenner is a wise man

Thanks to Michael M for the link to Music Ally's coverage of Peter Jenner at the Westminster eForum. Jenner is the emeritus president of the International Music Managers' Forum - you might also remember from his other work managing The Clash and T Rex and... well, everybody else, more or less.

He's not convinced the record industry have really thought through their reaction to digital music:

“It seems to me that in the online world, the marginal cost of a digital file is essentially zero,” he says, making it an “inescapable reality” that the digital world is pushing the price of music towards zero.

“If we rely on a copyright law – i.e. a right to copy law – we’re clearly barking down a historical blind alley.” He says the comparison is making airline legislation based on the rail network. “There aren’t many signals in the sky…”

Jenner's central argument is that, with the record companies getting it wrong, now is the time to return control of music to the people who make music:

[He says] pressure for – for example – copyright extension is coming from the industry rather than from creators. They’re not worrying about whether their grandchildren will benefit from a song when they’re writing and/or recording it.

His solution, though, is probably just as unworkable - in effect, a levy on internet connection:

“If we can get £1 a month from every person in this island for music, that would give us £60 million a month,” Jenner concludes, suggesting that this would come close to the current value of the industry here in the UK. “It is not a huge challenge.”

Righto - it would be fairly easy to organise collection. But given that right now the music industry is worth about sixty million quid a month, and not everyone is paying, why should everybody suddenly have to chip in a quid?

Just philosophically - why? My Dad used to listen to Radio 2 and would sometimes see a band on the TV. But his musical consumption was already all paid for - the PRS payments took care of it. Why should he pay a pound?

I buy lots of music, certainly more than a pound a month's worth. But I'll be damned if I want to chip in money which will end up going to supporting, say, Robbie Williams or Katie Price.

Which leads us on to the other question: how do you split up this sixty million pounds? Or forty million, by the time the administration costs of just collecting the the money has gone. If I stick up a YouTube video of myself humming, do I get a share? And if I don't, why don't I?

Because if this money is going to reward people for the music they make being used online, then who decides when you move from being someone humming on a YouTube video to being a musician worthy of a slice of this pie? Is it if I sing instead of hum? Do I have to sing my own song? But then the Sugababes won't qualify for any of the money?

And if you do admit that anyone who does something musical online gets a slice, then frankly, that forty million isn't going to go far. And that's before you get filmmakers asking why they're not getting a bit. And vloggers. And... well, you get the point.

So the risk for those involved in music is that, by breaking the link between the music and the payment, you don't increase the amount of cash in circulation, but you do expand the number of people trying to get their beaks wet.

Jenner knows what won't work. I'm not sure he quite has a plan for what will.

VirginMedia's Rapidshare blockage cock-up, not copyright

A ripple of panic ran round the internet yesterday as customers of VirginMedia suddenly discovered they were unable to access Rapidshare or Megaupload. Surely, ran the logic, the ISP is blocking these services because some users don't pay proper attention to licensing when they use them.

Calm down, says Virgin, it's just a bungle at our end:

"We are aware of an issue whereby certain file upload sites were unavailable for Virgin Media customers from late evening Thursday 13th May. Virgin Media did not block these sites and we are investigating the root cause. In the meantime we have implemented a workaround, and customers should be able to now access these sites again. We apologise for any inconvenience."

ISP Review offers a handy guide to getting round such 'problems' should they happen again.

Mini liveblog: DEBill debate on Today

Geoff Taylor of the BPI has just been on Today talking about the Digitial Economy Bill. It's impossible to tell if he really is an idiot, or just happy to try and take people for a ride.

Amongst his strange claims were that it didn't matter that there wasn't enough time for proper debate in parliament as "there had already been a lot of debate in the media" and that it didn't matter the elected chamber would look at the legislation properly as the Lords already had, and that that was where most revisions to legislation took place. (He didn't mention that was where a BPI patsy had dumped some of his trades group's own words into the legislation.)

Taylor also claimed that all the parties supported the bill being jumped into law through wash-up - when it was pointed out to him that the Liberal Democrats didn't, he stuttered that they supported the general principle, as if that was the same thing.

When David Babbs from 38 Degrees raised the question of the risk of public web services being hit by the law - clearly talking about internet cafes and services like coffee shops with wifi - Taylor dealt with this point by ignoring it completely and talking about "technical measures" which "householders" could use to "secure their connection" - again, it's unclear if he really didn't understand the difference between 'protecting a home network against someone sitting outside in a car downloading files through an unlocked connection' and 'a public wi-fi service that would be useless if it had to be locked down to stop people accessing it', or if he was deliberately confusing the two. Neither option is particularly edifying.

In the topping of his call to trust the idea of legislation being chucked together as MPs pack their bags, though, was his reassurance that we don't need to worry about customers being targeted unfairly, as Ofcom would be drawing up the rules and overseeing how they work.

That's alright then. It's not like the man likely to be the next Prime Minister has effectively announced that the Tories intend to junk Ofcom and build a new, light-touch regulator. Apart from perhaps being told that nothing bad would happen without Stephen Byers saying it was alright, I can't think of a less reassuring piece of reassurance.

BPI claim that giving them money will make money for ISPs

Having spent the last couple of years threatening ISPs without any real results, the BPI are now switching tactics, trying to persuade ISPs that the future lays with charging customers extra for always-on music:

British music industry trade body the BPI estimates that the UK's major ISPs – BT, Virgin Media, BSkyB, O2, Orange and TalkTalk – could make between £100m and £200m a year between them by 2013 by bundling legal download services with the broadband packages they already offer.

But hang on a minute - I've already got broadband. And I'm quite happy with Spotify, We7, iTunes and the other existing music services to provide my audio needs. Why would I give even more money to BT to expand my access to music by precisely no tunes?

"Pay extra every month, and get absolutely nothing extra in return."

Has anyone at the BPI ever actually run a business? Or met a person?

Still, how does the BPI expect this to work?

The report, produced by research firm Ovum for the BPI, based its revenue projection range on the basis of low (6,000 consumer sign-ups a month), medium (12,000) and high (24,000) levels of uptake of new legal download services over the next three years.

That sounds kind of hopeful.

The report reckons that the big ISPs could save as much as £20m a year by reducing churn – the proportion of customers cancelling their subscriptions – by offering such value-added services as legal downloads.

Except what drives churn is not the geegaws added to the service - remember when BT thought that people would love them forever if they got a spiffy Yahoo-provided log-in page? What causes churn is quality of connection - something that ISPs have little way of improving without actual investment - and price.

Adding music to the offering either means you've got to put the price up - "sign up for a more expensive service" - or, more likely, that the ISP will have to swallow the costs.

So, it's not just that the BPI wants ISPs to pay for policing record label copyright; they now want labels to be subsidised directly from ISP pockets.

And if adding music is so important to making an attractive package for broadband subscribers, each of the major ISPs would have to offer tracks, thereby meaning nobody would have an advantage, and all the communications companies will be shovelling cash to labels for absolutely nothing.

Ovum's report doesn't appear to explain why Playlouder's music-and-connectivity package was a flop; nor how Nokia's Comes With Music was so shunned by a market apparently keen to hand over millions of pounds for a web connection with tunes in it.

Virgin have a magic illegality-detecting machine

I'm not sure that it's entirely a heartwarming idea that Virgin are running a secret tool to inspect four out of every ten customer's internet streams to spot "illegal" files:

Jon James, Virgin Media executive director of broadband, said, “Understanding how consumer behaviour is changing will be an important requirement of Virgin Media’s upcoming music offering and, should they become law, the Government’s legislative proposals will also require measurement of the level of copyright infringement on ISPs’ networks.

“Detica’s CView technology potentially offers a non-intrusive solution which enhances our understanding of aggregate customer behaviour without identifying or storing individual customers’ data,” he added.

It's not entirely clear how having someone look at what you're doing online is "non-intrusive". Even if the intention is to keep it anonymised, there's a question mark over how anonymous you really can make such studies.

It's also not clear how, exactly, this data will detect 'illegal' files - by which we're presuming they mean unlicensed files. How - if the data is anonymous - would Virgin even begin to be able to tell if the data they're looking at is being used with or without permission? Do they have some sort of magic detection box?

TalkTalk walk the walk

As a useful contribution to the 'three strikes' debate (or the Lily Allen Clause, if you'd rather), Talk Talk have conducted a stunt showing how easy it is to drift along the street sucking wifi connectivity from other people's homes.

The point being that the record labels want people kicked off the internet for unlicensed filesharing, but you've got no way of knowing who was actually using the IP address at the time of the alleged "crime".

The BPI aren't flustered, though:

However the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is confident that a "robust" system for gathering evidence will ensure that only persistent file-sharers are targeted by the measures.

So that's alright, then - it's not like, say, your next door neighbour's kid would be in a position to persistently use your wifi connection.

BPI spokesman Adam Liversage told BBC News: "The account holder would receive a notification in the first instance, which would represent an opportunity to discuss file-sharing with others in the household and which would provide the account holder with the information and tools to help ensure that the account is not used illegally again.

It would "provide an opportunity to discuss file-sharing with others in the household" - although if your wifi is being sipped by the bloke next door, it's not immediately apparent how that would do any good.

Still, you've got to love the BPI's boundless optimism that most people support repressive copyright legislation, and there are hundreds of families just waiting for a threatening legal document to arrive so they've got an "opportunity" to talk about it.

The BPI have also managed to jump a stage or two - they're suggesting that their information will somehow provide the "tools" to help ensure that the account is not used illegally again. Actually, Adam, you're trying to construct this whole new set of rules because you don't want to have to prove any illegal activity - the system you and your labels are promoting doesn't have any legally-recognised trial of your claims; the ISPs would be expected to act on your say so.

Still, it's nice to see the BPI are finally admitting than an IP address does not link any particular person to activity on the internet. It would be nice if - having conceded this ground - they then apologised for having wasted everybody's time proposing an unworkable system and moved on.

But that isn't the BPI's way, of course. Having realised it is incapable of protecting its own copyrights, it tried to force the duty onto the ISPs. Having discovered that won't work either, the BPI now seems to be trying to suggest that 'looking after EMI's intellectual property' is a duty that you take on if you buy a wireless router. How much further is their absurd procession going to go? Will having sex without a condom suddenly mean that you're legally obliged to take responsibility for any infringement of Sony's IP rights that any possible issue might get involved in?

The BPI continue:

"This information would extend to explaining to the account holder how they can secure their wireless router to ensure that it isn't accessed by unknown third parties. But ultimately, householders will be held to account for what happens on their own networks."

Held to account? Held to account? You're from a group that puts out music, not bloody Judge Dredd. We've seen the BPI confuse themselves with the emergency services in past, when they've trotted alongside the police on piracy raids; someone really should take them aside and remind them that they're a trades assocation and not the army. Before they start buying guns to protect the next Duffy album.

[Thanks to James P]

Lily Allen gets James Blunt approval

Lily Allen has moved her file-sharing campaign to a new blog, idontwanttochangetheworld.blogspot.com. You've got to give her points for using a Billy Bragg lyric, and for being quite honest, in the URL - although imquitehappytofighttokeepthestatusquo.blogspot.com might have been even more honest.

So, who's rallying to Lily's call? James Blunt, that's who. Lily has scanned in a letter in support of her that James has sent to the Times (And I'm curious, Lily, as to why that use of copyright material is fine when filesharing isn't?).

Since Blunt is the sort of artist who exists solely because of the power of major labels to force any old toot on the public, it's not surprising that he's happy to keep the majors in business:

Sir, I want to put my hand up in support of Lily Allen (Thunderer, Sept 16). She’s asking British musicians to galvanise over a serious crime: the death of a great British industry — our music business.

The death of the music business might be serious, and it might be tragic, but it's not exactly criminal. That's what happens in a free market from time to time.

The world over, people are stealing music in its millions in the form of illegal file-sharing.

Did Blunt read this letter out loud before he sent it? It's not very sure-footed for a songwriter, is it?

It’s easy to do, and has become accepted by many, but people need to know that it is destroying people’s livelihoods and suffocating emerging British artists.

Cliff Richard has - I know this for a fact - had to start turning his underpants inside out as he can only afford to go to the launderette once a month now, and Dappy from N-Dubz is having to keep his shifts on down the arcade. It's a tragedy.

Blunt doesn't seem to think that the music industry as it worked since the industrialisation of recorded sound might also have suffocated emerging British artists, but then he has about as strong a grasp of history as he does of language.

The music business is made up of thousands of jobbing musicians, producers, mixers and engineers creating and shaping popular music and culture, but illegal file-sharing is cutting off the income from their work.

... if you make the massive assumption that a file shared is a sale lost; and if you believe that there's some reason why the rates for the job in a world where distribution was limited should be the same in a world where distribution is virtually unlimited.

Without the revenue from established artists, record labels cannot fund emerging musicians.

... not even in the 'one album and if you don't recoup, you're dropped' model that has been pissing on dreams since the 1980s.

Blunt, you'll note, just assumes that the only way to fund musicians is by a record label putting the money up front. That's the way it's always been done, so why should we even think of changing it?

They’ll just re-master the Beatles albums again, because they can’t afford to put an amazing new band into a studio to record something that may surpass Sergeant Pepper.

Given the amount of cash spent on the Beatles re-releases, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of cash sloshing about when they want to find money to buy the front page of the NME. It's pitiful to suggest the conservatism of the labels is a response to filesharing - the reissue-instead-of-develop-talent model has been a staple of the music business ever since it realised it could flog everyone the same records they already owned by putting them out on CD.

John Harris has also used this "there won't be a new Beatles unless we kill file-sharing" argument, which somehow ignores that the UK music industry hasn't created anything like a Beatles in over 40 years. It's barely been able to scrape together a Duran Duran in the last twenty.

At long last the Government is looking to legislate to protect the industry. Peter Mandelson is looking to engage the internet service providers who, in my opinion, handle stolen goods, and should take much more responsibility.

Handle stolen goods? I've ragged on James Blunt quite a bit in the past, and always have that little guilty voice at the back of my head: "What if he isn't a bad chap? What if he's an alright sort of person who just happens to have the musical appeal of a chocolate box kitten?" It's nice to discover he really is a bit of an arse. Handling stolen goods, indeed.

How this legislation pans out, and if it goes through at all, is critical to the survival of the British music business...

No, James; it really isn't. If you pushed all file-sharing out the picture, the British music business is still going to have to face some lean years. If you're lying in the desert, chained to posts, your problems won't vanish if you can scare off the buzzards.

...critical to thousands of jobs; and critical to our ability to nurture and develop great musicians...

No, James; it really isn't. Nurturing musicians has nothing much to do with organising dump bins of CDs for Asda, booking a quarter page in the NME or ensuring a delivery van arrives at HMV Kettering on time. If we want to nuture great musicians, let's take the money that people keep saying ISPs should be collecting, and use it to invest in a network of music teachers and instruments for every school instead of passing it straight to companies which happen to have bought out some intellectual property rights.

But this isn't about encouraging the next generation of artists; it's those who have already made it trying to prop up a system which sees them doing alright, still.

Lily and Matt talk rights

Although Lily Allen is mostly wrong on copyright, it's with a degree of respect that I wave my hands at her latest blog yelling "no! no! no!" At least she's debating, sort-of, something, with her call for people to pay more for music.

On MySpace. A site whose popularity was first, largely, built on sheaf after sheaf of unlicensed music. Perhaps Lily doesn't see her use of MySpace, and delivery of traffic there, as a reward for past behaviour, but it does smack of someone using a platform built from profits of crime to launch a clean-up campaign.

So, what does Lily have to say in her follow up?

I've had a lot of responses back since my previous blog posting here. The long and short of it is, even before this economic downturn Piracy has been affecting all areas of entertainment, except maybe theatre. CD sales, Film DVD sales, book sales , TV DVD sales, everything.

Everything except theatre, eh?

Cinema's up, too:

Cinema admissions for June stood at 12.5m, an increase of 5.6% yr on yr.

• The average weekly admissions figure for June were 2.91m an increase of a 5.4% on average weeks in June 2008.


• Q2 admissions have reached 42.1m (up 22.5%) and the highest Q2 since 2004.

Book sales down? Are you sure, Lily? It's not quite so clear:

August 12, 2009, New York, NY: Book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the month of June increased by 21.5 percent at $942.6 million and were up by 1.8 percent for the year.

And so on. But we're cherry-picking data here, admitedly.

Now, if people go on consuming at the rate they are and do not pay for what they are consuming, not only will the artists within all these industries be without jobs and unable to express themselves but the behind the scenes people too.

This is convoluted. If people do stop consuming without paying, you still won't be any better off.

And there's no direct link between people being able to express themselves and people buying corporate products:

- Hey, Romeo, will you sing me a love song?
- Nah, Juliet, as people have stopped buying CDs from Barnes and Noble, rendering me somehow incapable of writing and singing a song for you

Thats literally millions of jobs . .

Is it? The UK government last year put the number of people employed in the creative sector at 2 million. A third of these were in software and computer games development, and there's also visual arts, ballet dancers, the staff of the BBC and architects amongst others helping the headcount. All in all, if filesharing had the power to totally wipe out the film and music industries (and it doesn't), you'd be talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, not "literally millions." Not to be taken lightly, but not quite the same.

I know that a lot of you want to know that you're not being overcharged for a product and you want to know that your hard earned cash is going to the right places, alot of work has to be done in order for this to happen.

The market price for individual, basic mp3s is almost zero. Any move the government makes is merely going to artificially inflate the price. Or, in other words, overcharging for a product.

I think that paying 14.99 for an album is ridiculous, I'm with you on that, and that wont happen again, but piracy is not the answer.

"That won't happen again" because... why, exactly, Lily? It happened in the first place because the music industry were able to exploit a limited supply of product and - for each record individually - a monopoly of supply.

You're campaigning tirelessly to see the conditions under which albums rose to fifteen quid be replicated online by the use of copyright barriers. How can you say that it won't happen again?

It's hard enough to get a job at the moment.

Lily Allen spent the last three weeks trying to get something - anything - down at Tesco, and even her experience... oh, sorry, she's just guessing, isn't she?

People are being laid off in all areas and the record companies are no exception.

Yes. Do you suppose piracy might be affecting banks and replacement window companies as well, or do you think this might be some broader economic point totally unrelated to how many people have bookmarked the Pirate Bay?

My own label EMI laid off thousands last year. I don't care so much about the high-ups (and by the way they're always the last to go - what a surprise) but the people who are going out are the young ones, the life blood basically.

EMI are in a mess because they were leveraged out by a private equity company who piled on debt without having much of a clue how to run a record company. That didn't happen because someone copied a CD off their mate.

Oh - and quite a few executives at EMI have lost their jobs over the last couple of years, too.

They're the ones that go first, , I've seen it. And the same is happening in TV and film. Why do you think you are just getting Terminator 6 and Harry Potter 7 instead of exciting new voices? Because the young voices are not there anymore.

Film sequels were only invented in 2004, after the last fresh idea was sucked out of a branch of the Odeon by a chap with a camcorder. This, Lily, is just piffle and I think in your heart you know that pointing to the conclusion of a movie franchise that was launched as a franchise to somehow suggest that young people don't make movies any more is just crazy. Did directors and producers used to be treated Logans Run style back in the 1970s?

Do you care about that, or do you just want to watch and listen to the products of the last generation?

This isn't a coherent argument at all - if you fileshare, there won't be any The XX? But people do fileshare, and there's still a constant parade of young people in tight jeans parading out of from wherever they come. Many of them disappear again quickly - but twas ever thus. Hardly anyone makes any money from music, and hardly anyone ever has.

Or do you want a voice that is heard and can make a difference? What I do know is we have to invest in this sector of our country guys, we are great film makers,we have incredible writers and authors, historically the best music makers, we cant throw it all away.

Here's a question: how many tracks and books have gone unwritten because of piracy against the number unwritten because the major media corporations refusing to invest, or pulling the blanket after a failure by a new name to reach an arbitrary level of sales?

The internet is the most amazing thing, but it should be OUR thing, and ironically piracy is just playing into the hands of the corporations.

Because EMI isn't, apparently, a corporation?

What these artists and creators do, they do for the love of it,

so... erm... they'll carry on doing it even in the unlikely scenario of the money disappearing altogether?

I know its hard because money is scarce but we have to inject money back into these areas. It's not fair to steal peoples material,I know it's art and it has no physical value but even Shakespeare had shares in The Globe Theatre.

Yes. He underwrote his creativity - because there was little money in actually acting - by taking a stake in a different part of the industry.

People will lose their jobs, you'll be watching X-factor, Simon Cowell will be getting richer, radio stations will be churning out old back catalogues from people your dad or even your grandads age(vera lynn is No 1 this week) and the taxpayer will have to subsidize yet more unemployment.

The suggestion that the X Factor is a reaction to filesharing, and not the same labels whose case Allen is pressing now colluding in a cheaper way of knocking out records, is just ridiculous. And for Allen to be pleading for EMI while knocking Vera Lynn at the top of the charts is just hypocritical. In fact, MySpace points out how much:

Please, please, please go and see a film in the cinema instead of buying it in Tesco's car-park , buy a c.d. or album off itunes if you really like it, and god help us, keep buying books . If we do this, i really think we can make a difference. Anyone band, writer, author, musician, actress please feel free to contact me on this matter if you feel it is important

It's actually not that silly a thing to say - if you like culture, buy some culture. But this is so far from "if you share files, you must be punished" as to be laughable.

Allen also runs a response to her earlier post from Matt Bellamy. His stance is even more disappointing, as you'd hope he had a better grasp on things:

My current opinion is that file sharing is now the norm. This cannot be changed without an attack on perceived civil liberties which will never go down well.

"Perceived" civil liberties, Matt? The word "perceived" here being used in the sense of "actual, but difficult for me, so I'll pretend they're not there."

The problem is that the ISPs making the extreme profits (due to millions of broadband subscriptions) are not being taxed by the copyright owners correctly and this is a legislation issue.

I'm sorry? Is this really written by Matt Bellamy or a thirteen year-old at the Brits school? Copyright owners do not tax. Governments tax. You might raise a royalty - but clearly, this is being done "correctly", otherwise it wouldn't be a legislation issue, it'd be one of litigation.

Radio stations and TV stations etc have to pay the copyright owners (both recording and publishing) a fee for using material they do not own. ISPs should have to pay in the same way with a collection agency like PRS doing the monitoring and calculations based on encoded (but freely downloaded) data.

But ISPs are not broadcasters. What you're proposing is akin to the transmission companies being forced to pay for the material that others are using their network to share. Which is clearly nuts.

Broadband makes the internet essentially the new broadcaster. This is the point which is being missed.

It's not "being missed", Matt, it's just plain wrong. The internet is a distribution network. It makes lots of people with servers potentially akin to broadcasters, but an ADSL line is no more a broadcaster than the M1 is a motor vehicle.

Also, usage should have a value. Someone who just checks email uses minimal bandwidth, but someone who downloads 1 gig per day uses way more, but at the moment they pay the same.

Unless they're using, say, dial-up at a penny per minute, or mobile. Or on one of those deals where the amount of data is tiered. But broadly, two people on the same deal will pay the same, regardless of use. This is a pretty good measure, actually, as it encourages use of the internet and people buying music and films and apps.

It is clear which user is hitting the creative industries and it is clear which user is not, so for this reason, usage should also be priced accordingly.

Again, Matt, you're talking absolute twaddle. You might use a lot of bandwidth because you're mailing video you've taken of your kid to his grandma. You might use a lot of bandwidth because you're a Spotify premium user and streaming legal, paid-for music all through the day. You might be one of those struggling creative people Allen was talking about, using the net to share music you've written with journalists and other artists. You could be watching iPlayer. You might just be Stephen Fry using Twitter. To extrapolate that someone using a lot of bandwidth must be doing because they're using unlicensed material is such a fundamentally flawed assumption as to render your entire argument pointless.

The end result will be a taxed, monitored ISP based on usage which will ensure both the freedom of the consumer and the rights of the artists - the loser will be the ISP who will probably have to increase subscription costs to compensate, but the user will have the freedom to choose between checking a few emails (which will cost far less than a current monthly subscription) and downloading tons of music and film (which will cost probably a bit more than current subscription, but not that much more).

But the infrastructure of broadband is pretty expensive - it's unlikely any ISP would be able to afford to run an account which was for "just checking email", except at a loss. And if all I'm doing is downloading iTunes tracks which I've paid for, and mp3s being sent to me PR people, why should I be forced to pay a levy on my connectivity to go to music businesses?

And, come to that: why should it be only musicians who get money from any such levy? Shouldn't anyone who shares any content on the internet get a slice? What makes Matt Bellamy more deserving of money made from snooping on people's communications than, say, a journalist whose article gets circulated away from his paper's website?

We should set up a meeting with Lord Mandelson as he is on this issue at the moment, I'm sure he would meet us for breakfast!

I bet he bloody would, Matt. Enough said.

Digital Britain: a world where no file need fear violation

So, then, the detail on those filesharing proposals contained in Digital Britain. The proposals are up for consultation, through the Bis department. The Bis department is, of course, the one where Dame Manda Rin is minister of state.

Seriously, though, it's not clear why the Department for Culture, Media and Sport throws up the idea of three-strikes (or something like it) and then passes it over the Business, Innovation and Skills to do the dirty work. Joined-up government or fractured thinking?

The consultation document talks often of "illegal" filesharing, although the title of the consultation itself is a little more conciliatory:

Consultation on Legislation to Address Illicit P2P File-Sharing

Illicit rather than illegal.

Action 13 sets out two obligations which will apply to ISPs. ISPs will be required to send notifications to subscribers who have been identified in relation to alleged infringements of copyright.

Action 13 itself suggests that there will be some sort of level of proof required, albeit vaguely: there's lots of talk about how there will be a certain level of evidence, but that's going to be thought about later on, somewhere down the line. When, presumably, someone else can deal with the problem of just how this 'evidence' will be gathered without private companies snooping on individuals.

Then:

The second obligation is for ISPs to maintain (anonymised) records of the number of times an individual subscriber has been so identified and to maintain lists of those most frequently identified.

So, let's get this straight: If, for example, Warners say I'm file sharing - offering some sort of evidence which is apparently enough to satisfy Ofcom but not good enough for Warners to actually bring their own court action, my ISP will start to compile a list.

Then, the mere fact of having been on the list frequently can be used to build a case against you in court.

It all seems a bit extreme for a futile attempt to try and impose 1970s music pricing structures on music sales in the 2010s.

There's to be an injunction on Ofcom to "reduce" filesharing by 70% in a year - the year is yet to be specified - through the sending of stiff letters (the government seems to believe they work; perhaps they view a 'you have downloaded' letter as being a civilian equivalent of a 9pm call from the Daily Telegraph that starts 'just been looking at your expenses...'). If they don't hit this target, then the more strict rules will be brought in - throwing people offline, a bit, but gently, for a while, or - hilariously - blocking their access to certain sites "or protocols".

How? How will you do that when, if you tell BT to not let me go on piratebay, I'll just go out and buy a pay-as-you-go dongle from 3 instead? Does anyone really believe this sort of thing even makes any coherent sense? Or are the government merely responding to letters from the BPI and chums in the way an uncle might indulge a child by awkwardly playing fairy tea-parties with them?

And how would you go about "measuring" filesharing anyway? How on earth could you establish a regime for doing a benchmark study and then a comparison a year later? Especially with a degree of accuracy that's going to trigger a round of legislation?

Are we to take the rights-holder's word for it - even when their ability to provide straight numbers has been proved somewhat unreliable in the past? Or will Ofcom be given the power to inspect people's internet traffic? But, frankly, why should they?

The numbers at the back of the report reckon that the costs of the measures will be £35million to set-up, with up to £50million a year; the benefits are estimated at £200m annually. If those figures are correct, then why not invite the rights holders - who will benefit - to pay the costs of the ISPs, who will be paying out? Rights holders would surely be quids in - unless their claims of how much they're losing, and could expect to claw back, are just fantastic.

The acknowledgments are interesting:

We would like to thank the following organisations for their time and efforts in helping us produce this consultation:


• BBC
• British Phonographic Industry
• BT
Business Software Alliance
• Carphone Warehouse
• Channel 4
• Consumer Focus
• Federation against software theft (FAST)
• Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA)
PRS for Music
• Motion Picture Association (MPA)
• NBC Universal
• NESTA
• John Newbigin
• O2
• Ofcom
• Orange
• Premier Rugby Ltd
• Rugby Football Union
• Sony
• Thus
• Tiscali
Time Warner
• T Mobile
• Warner Bros
• Universal Music
• Virgin Media

Somehow, it's almost as if nobody thought to ask people who use telephony services, or internet, or listen to music or go to films. The only apparent 'voice of the consumer' is Consumer Focus, the gnats-weak body that has subsumed the fail-corpses of organisations like Postwatch and Energywatch. And that's the government. Apparently you can only help shape the direction of the discussion if you have a financial, not a cultural, interest; if it leans towards the status quo, so much the better.

ISPs refuse, again, to do copyright holder's policing

Up to a point, anyway.

As the copyright capitalists continue to cling to their belief that cutting people off from the web would be both legal, and help the dwindling market price of licensed content, the UK ISPs have again said they aren't going to become the cops. Not unless there's something else in it for them:

But the ISPs aren't going quietly into that dark night. In a statement, the Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) said that it agreed with creative industry calls for "the safe and secure delivery of legal content." Getting access to this content remains difficult, though, and ISPA notes that "Internet companies remain extremely frustrated by the ongoing difficulties in securing licensing that is needed to offer consumers legal alternatives through new models of online content distribution. It is our view that legislation on enforcement should only be introduced on the condition that the rights holder industry commits to significant licensing reform."

So, it's not quite the high-minded rejection of the idea that you should be cast adrift from participating in society so much as the insistence that, if they're going to be providing security for copyright material, they want a slice of the action.

Spain thinks internet users owe songwriters a living

The spread of copyright management concerns demanding that ISPs make up the losses they're experiencing as their businesses undergo structural change has reached Spain:

The copyright holders, the Coalition of Creators represented by the General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE), wanted the ISPs to charge their customers extra to cover alleged losses from their activities on P2P networks. Eduardo Bautista, SGAE’s president, recently said that it is the ISPs “civic duty” to cooperate. Unsurprisingly, he also wants repeat infringers to be disconnected from the web.

It's a "civic duty", is it? Clearly, Bautista realises that he has a claim which is economically and morally invalid, so he's now - perhaps unwittingly - admitted that what he's after is an act of charity.

The Spanish ISPs aren't, naturally, rushing to embrace this thinking.

Government buries three strikes

The music industry's dream of people being banished from the internet if they're caught downloading music without the correct licences is fading fast. David Lammy, Intellectual Property Minister, has told The Times it ain't gonna happen:

Mr Lammy, who has begun a big consultation entitled Developing a Copyright Agenda for the 21st Century, said that there was a big difference between organised counterfeiting gangs and “younger people not quite buying into the system”. He said: “We can't have a system where we're talking about arresting teenagers in their bedrooms. People can rent a room in an hotel and leave with a bar of soap - there's a big difference between leaving with a bar of soap and leaving with the television.”

He said he hoped the memorandum of understanding would mean that the Government did not have to apply “the heavy hand of legislation”.

Music industry figures said they were disappointed by Mr Lammy's comments. One senior figure said: “The relative cost of stealing a bar of soap from an hotel might be small, but if it came to seven million people nicking the soap each year, which is what we have in the music industry, I'm sure that hotel chain would do something about it.”

Actually, the soap metaphor doesn't work - the cost of that small basket of toiletries is factored in to the cost of the room. And once you've opened the bar of soap, it's not like you can leave it to be used by the next person along. I think Lammy and the unnamed senior figure are thinking of towels, aren't they?

Interesting that the "senior figure" isn't confident enough to put his name to his thoughts.

Peter Jenner's still pushing for a music industry levy

It's getting on for three years now since former Clash and Billy Bragg manager Peter Jenner first floated the idea that the music industry should receive cash from a levy on the cost of digital connections. He's still banging away at it, although he's smart enough to propose that the telecoms industry might want to hide it away from the customer's eyes:

The Government can insist compensation has to be paid by the DSPs for the non-commercial, unauthorised use of copyright material. How they pay for this nominal amount is up to them. Maybe it gets paid out of customer retention and acquisition budgets, maybe through higher fees tied to higher capacity services, maybe through advertising or sponsorship or any combination thereof.

Interestingly, Jenner is suggesting that this money replace the current 'selling things' business model of the music industry. So what he's describing here as a "nominal amount" is actually the entire income of the British music sector. Which would suggest it's quite a large figure. Surely the pile of money is either nominal, or it's not? And if it is nominal, then why make a fuss about it?

Jenner then reveals exactly how nominal the sum he has in mind would be:

It is worth noting that the payment of £2 per month per customer with a broadband connection would generate £1.2 Billion, if there were 50 million broadband enabled customers in the UK. This sum is as big as the highest gross value of the UK Record Industry at its height, and at full price with no allowance for discounts, returns etc. This revenue would come through allocated to track without any need for warehouses, shipping, returns, salesmen, distribution, retailers etc.

So, it's as much money as the music industry has ever made. That sort of nominal figure.

Jenner's figures are about as meaningful as his argument is rigorous - at the moment, according to the National Office Of Statistics, there are 18 million households that have internet access. That's 65 per cent of all households, so even if the other 35 per cent of households did come online, you'd still only have at most thirty million; if you add in the 2.6 million businesses you'd still be struggling to get anywhere near fifty million. Jenner might be arguing that you pay the levy for every connection, but that would be even more absurd - why should someone who could listen to music all day, every day through a single connection be paying a quarter as much as someone who has broadband at home and in their office, and a work mobile phone and perhaps a personal one, but never downloads a single track?

But leave that to one side, and let's just look again at what Jenner is suggesting with a straight face: the music industry should be handed as much money as it has ever made on a regular basis, paid for by people who may or may not have touched any of their music.

One of this worries about the people he dismisses as "freetards" is that, if everyone took music for free and never returned a penny to the industry, why would the record companies ever bother to invest in new music? That's a fair question (although the answer - why do we need a record company to create new music - might make him a little uncomfortable), but isn't offering music industry businesses a guaranteed income that dwarves anything they could manage for themselves equally a fantastic disincentive to invest? After all, if you've just hyper-monetised the back catalogue, why would you bother pouring speculative funds into creating new stuff?

Jenner's idea is to tie the distribution of the cash to the individual tracks - you get a third of a thruppence or whatever for every play of one of your songs. Aware that this is going to be a bloody nightmare to administer, he suggests the creation of a meta-collection society.

What Jenner doesn't seem to have factored in is that, if there is a body distributing money based on a play-per-track basis, a large swathe of this money will have to go out the country: if I'm listening to a track recorded by a Canadian band, on a Canadian server, what moral reason could there be for not giving them their portion of a farthing that they would earn if they came from Camden? Likewise, anyone whistling a tune on YouTube could lay a stake to having recompense from this central fund. Because why should Jagger and Richards get money for their songs and not some bloke in the street? How much work would be involved in processing a fund that has to take account of every time anything musical comes out of a tiny speaker? And even with his unlikely sounding sum of cash, by the time it's been administered, and spread over millions of people, are such tiny sums of money going to do anyone any good at all? Perhaps this is what Jenner is thinking of when he says it's nominal.

In short, Jenner has proposed (again) an idea that is unfair, and impractical. Let's hope that nobody takes him seriously, and he's still punting this pipedream in 2012.

ISP tells RIAA: happy to help, where do we send the bill?

Given that the brilliant new idea from the RIAA is instead of wasting millions suing people, getting the ISPs to police copyrights, it's perhaps unsurprising that ISPs are asking exactly how the RIAA intends to pay for this service:

Jerry Scroggin is the owner of Bayou Internet and Communications(BIC), a small ISP based in Monroe, Louisiana with around 11,000 small business, residential, and municipal customers. BIC already receives notifications from the RIAA each month, and each time"I ask for their billing address," Scroggin told CNET. "Usually, I never hear back."

Scroggin understands the labels' need to protect their content and says he has a history of cooperating with law enforcement. In the case of RIAA notices, however, there is a lack of information to work from, but significant expense is involved when trying to track down a user who may not be doing anything wrong.

Interesting that the RIAA seem unwilling to pay for ISPs to do their work for them - it's almost as if the major labels have a team of ironists creating policy: "we'll make a lot of fuss about how bad it is for our business if people come to expect something for nothing, and then we'll tell another business we expect something for nothing..."

Warner music proposes universities subsidise private record companies

Taking the ever-popular 'nice place you've got here, shame if something happened to it' usual background threat from the RIAA companies, Warner Music have developed a new model - suggesting to American universities that, if they bought a "licence" to cover anyone on their campuses who may or may not be downloading music, then they'll stop suing the universities.

You can see the attraction - Warners get more money than they could ever earn legitimately, the universities are out of pocket but no longer have to waste resources dealing with RIAA companies. Sure, it's effectively being made to hand over a large sum of cash to stop being bullied, but the record company line is 'what means more to you - keeping your lunch money or losing the threat of having your head pushed down the toilet'?

This, though, is just stage one: if they can persuade the universities that it's right and proper that record companies get cash in return for just the potential risk of downloaded pirate music, it will be a short step to arguing that anyone who logs on to the internet be treated in the same way. So, hey, perhaps the ISPs should pay a lets-not-call-it-a-tax for all their customers, right?

You'd have thought the labels might have quietly let this idea drop after the chilly reception it got years ago - especially since it seems to run contrary to the standard RIAA line. If people are covered by a blanket payment for downloading 'free' music, then doesn't that actually make it okay for them to take what, hitherto, have been unlicensed files? Doesn't it send that message - that music is free, not something to be paid for and cherished - that the RIAA has been trying to counter for the last decade?

And if it's fine for someone in Texas to download tracks with abandon, it follows that it must be fine for them to share the same tracks. How would the rest of the world's labels feel about the whole of America suddenly allowed to share their music online? Oh, sure, it might only be in America where the ISP tax allows the music to be sucked back down for free, but the creation of large pools of music online is going to be tempting for the French, the British, the Icelandic and everyone else.

Then you've got the likely reaction of services who have been working to create business models around legal music - who will want to listen to an ad-supported legal download if they're already paying for every tune they can think of free via the ISP tax? The music industry has been hoping for an iTunes killer for years; this would not just kill iTunes, but We7, SpiralFrog, Rhapsody, ZuneStore and anyone else who has tried to work with the RIAA companies.

Of course, there is one upside for the labels - if they're raking in money from a blanket agreement, they're not going to have to be quite so diligent in making sure these royalties flow to the artists. If someone buys an OMD track, time and money has to be invested in making sure Andy McCluskey gets his quarter cent; if the cash is flowing from a blanket payment, it's going to be much harder for artists to follow a trail from their music being downloaded to seeing payment.

A small advantage for the music industry, in the short term, but at the cost of completely destroying their own businesses. Only a suicidal business would embrace such a move. Does nobody in the RIAA have any ability to set aside their greed for gold, even in their own interests?

Another 'you're pirating yourself' case

This isn't, sadly, the first time this has happened: Luke Fishbeck out of Lucky Dragons has had his website frozen - and his online store shuttered - because, erm, he was giving away his own music under a Creative Commons licence. He's appealing for assistance through his Facebook page:

"had my website shut down for copyright violation for sharing stuff i made myself under creative commons... lawyer friends help?"

It's not just vexing; with his legitimate store closed, it's costing Luke real money - and, you could argue, running the heavy-handed ISP up a potential claim for loss.

The host in question appears to be Bluehost.com, judging by a quick whois look-up.

[Thanks to Alex B for the tip]