French anti-filesharing company hacked wide open

Torrent Freak is reporting that Trident Media Guard, the company employed by the French copyright industry to spy on peer-to-peer networks, has been hacked:

“A virtual machine leaked a lot of information like scripts, p2p clients to generate fake peers, local physical addresses in the datacenter and even a password that could lead to a major global TMG security breach,” French security researcher Olivier Laurelli, aka Bluetouff, just informed TorrentFreak.

You'd think that a company which sells its services protecting other online would be a bit better with its own digital security; it's a bit like discovering the front door of the Yale factory blowing open in the wind.

Music industry exceutives blame PC Mag for exposing their futility

You can understand the rage felt by the music industry executives who have signed a letter accusing PC Mag of 'encouraging' people to steal music.

What got them angry was a piece written in response to the closure of LimeWire, which effectively said "there are lots of similar services which haven't been shut down".

In other words: the music company has just spent a fortune fixing a leak in their bathtub while the water is cascading from the hot water tank in the roof.

Still, let's hear what the copyright industry has to say, shall we?

We write to express our deep disappointment with your decision to publish Chloe Albanesius’ October 27 article, “LimeWire is Dead: What are the Alternatives?” as well as Sarah Jacobsson Purewal’s November 9, 2010 article “LimeWire is Quietly Resurrected: It's Baaack!” Both articles are nothing more than a roadmap for continued music piracy. The disclaimer in the first, “PC Magazine does not condone the download of copyrighted or illegal material,” rings hollow to say the least.

If, like me, you missed these articles, you'll be delighted that the wise owls at the record industry have drawn your attention to them - Limewire Is Dead and It's Baaaack may very well have passed unnoticed had there not been all this foot-stomping from the RIAA. They really know how to grow an audience with a viral campaign, don't they?

Let’s be honest. The vast majority of LimeWire’s users were interested in one thing and one thing only: downloading our music for free with the full knowledge that what they were doing was illegal. The harm done to the creative community when people are encouraged to steal our music is immeasurable. Disclaimer or no, when you offer a list of alternative P2P sites to LimeWire – and include more of the serial offenders -- PC Magazine is slyly encouraging people to steal more music and place at risk the tens of thousands of music industry jobs – including singers, songwriters, musicians and the technical professionals who put it all together. Even worse is offering a direct link to a “resurrected” Limewire as follows: “I went ahead and downloaded LimeWire Pirate Edition for *ahem* research purposes, and can report that it appears to be working very smoothly. In the event that you, yourself, would like to do some research, you can download the client here (direct link).”

We've all been doing this long enough, yes, to not need to point out that use of the word "steal" and claims of job losses is just nonsense. Or that filesharing services have non-evil uses, and just as saying 'here is a list of places that sell crowbars' isn't an extortion to breaking and entering, saying 'here are peer-to-peer networks' isn't an encouragement to commit crime.

Our argument is buttressed by the fact that PC Magazine offered no alternatives that are 100% legal.

None of the alternatives listed are any per cent illegal. The befuddled music execs have confused 'contain unlicensed files' with 'are not RIAA-approved music selling sites'.

In fact, legitimate download services, who have developed business models based on a respect for copyright and have entered into mutually beneficial arrangements with the music industry are undoubtedly outraged by your feeble attempt to undercut their ability to compete in the legal marketplace.

Legitimate music download services aren't listed in a piece about peer-to-peer networks because they're not peer-to-peer networks. It's like moaning that there's nothing about vegetarianism in an article recommending butcher's shops. And those legitimate services have managed to build a presence alongside, not even despite, the existence of much better-known peer-to-peer networks. Generally, they've tended to accept they're part of the landscape and concentrate on giving people reasons to pay for files instead - something the music industry still seems incapable of grasping as being fundamental to a successful online business.

We would hope that your sense of decency and the realization that even PC Magazine has a responsibility to the rule of law, would have informed your editorial decision in this matter. We suspect you’d feel differently about this issue if, like the music industry, you’d had to let go more than half of the talented writers and journalists who create your magazine because of uncontrolled piracy of their work. Unfortunately, it is clear that the rule of law was an afterthought.

Yeah, you journalists, sitting around in an industry which hasn't been affected in any way by the development of the internet. It's not like your stuff can be cut and pasted, is it?

Oh.

Here's the list of signatories in full:

Rich Bengloff, President, American Association of Independent Music
Ray Hair, President, American Federation of Musicians
Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, National Executive Director, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
John LoFrumento, CEO, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
Del Bryant, President & CEO, Broadcast Music, Inc.
Elwyn Raymer, President, Church Music Publishers Association- Action Fund
Ed Leonard, Chairman, Gospel Music Association
Gary Churgin, President/CEO, Harry Fox Agency
Barry Bergman, President, Music Managers Forum-US
Jim Donio, President, National Association of Recording Merchandisers
David Israelite, President & CEO, National Music Publishers Association
Steve Bogard, President, Nashville Songwriters Association International
Neil Portnow, President/CEO, The Recording Academy
Mitch Bainwol, Chairman & CEO, Recording Industry Association of America
Pat Collins, President/COO, SESAC
Rick Carnes, President, The Songwriters Guild of America
John Simson, Executive Director, SoundExchange

Ray Hair? Seriously?

RIAA promote file-sharing websites

Oh, sure, the idea was to point at evil, file-sharing websites and say "look how terrible these people are." But did the RIAA not realise that issuing a list of the 'worst' file-sharing offenders will do nothing other than promote the ones people haven't already heard of.

So there's the familiar: Rapidshare, ISOHunt, The Pirate Bay. But I'm sure RMX4U.com and MP3Fiesta.com will be thrilled that the major labels have effectively provided them with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of free advertising.

The sixth site on the list was Baidu. Yes, the search engine that dominates China:

Hundreds and thousands of times
for her I searched in chaos
suddenly, I turned by chance
to where the lights were waning
and there she stood.

Good luck with taking on Baidu, RIAA. If you have success there, you'll be going on to try and stop the wind from blowing in the finals.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Peter Serafinowicz

Peter Serafinowicz - off the internet's popular Twitter - contributes to Gawker to explain why he "steals" movies - even the ones he's in:

Frank Zappa once said that Communism could never work because people like to own stuff. I felt a similar way about CDs when music began to arrive in MP3 form. Now, my music happily resides in my iTunes library, spread over various computers and iPods.

Music's purpose is to be heard. It doesn't need to live on discs in boxes on a groaning shelf any more. When I go into a Virgin Megastore or HMV (a rare occurrence now, a vestigial habit) I just see a huge room filled with redundant plastic. Now with Spotify and other streaming services I'm even starting to begrudge the space taken up on my hard drive.

I recently directed the music video for Hot Chip's "I Feel Better." Contractually, the video had to be hosted on EMI's official YouTube channel, which disabled non-UK users from viewing it, limiting its audience by around 80%. Frustrated, I put it up on my own YouTube channel with no region restrictions, and at time of writing is just shy of a million views. EMI then remotely disabled embedding on my version, thereby limiting its audience again. If you're in the business of promoting a band, why would you want to stop people watching their promotional video?

[Thanks to Michael M for the link]

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.

Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Music Matters

After fifteen or so years trying to tell you that playing an unlicensed music file was akin to stealing a handbag, or a CD, or a kitten, the music industry has decided to change tack. They're having a crack at treating file sharing like drink driving:

Comparisons were made at the launch in London to anti-drink driving campaigns which have gradually changed attitudes.

Ms Byrne said of such parallels: "Absolutely, I spoke to quite a few people when we were doing this campaign and it's not going to happen overnight but I think the whole point is basically creating awareness and to chip, chip away."

They're exactly the same thing. Apart from drink driving being something that kills people, while a person listening to an unlicensed music file is very, very unlikely to mount the pavement, hit a pedestrian and put people in hospital.

The project is called Music Matters, and starts from the wrong-footed hypothesis that people don't understand the issues. "If only we could explain how badly EMI needs the 0.0001p it would have got from a legal streaming of that Robbie Williams song you listened to without permission; how you're effectively stealing cash from the servicing of that big pile of debt. And the best way to do that is to pretend that you're as bad as a drunk driver."

But it's not just patronising and insulting comparisons with drunk driving. Oh, no:

Chris Morrison of CMO Management agreed that the problem is generational.

But he continued: "You can educate that out of people... Racial prejudice was rife when I was a child... the public attitude towards it has changed radically."

They're not just fighting crime; the music industry is quite close like Martin Luther King. Unfortunately, that's close as in 'standing close by his grave pissing on his memory', but close nevertheless.

Morrison concludes:

"Music must have a perceived value if it's to have a future."

That's true. Don't expect your Mum to whistle as she cuts the grass if there's no money in it. Don't think that people will make music because they love the sound, or enjoy performing, or want to engage with an audience. If you can't hang a price tag on music, it will vanish.

Can we turn to Gennaro Castaldo, HMV's expert in expertise, for some sensible viewpoint?

No.

HMV's Gennaro Castaldo said the campaign was "engaging with the fans for the first time.

"Up to now they've probably been communicated to or dictated to, they've read about it but they've never actually been engaged with dialogue in this way before."

It's not entiely a dialogue if it's designed to change people's thinking to match that of the organisers, is it? Going "tell us what you think, and then we'll tell you what to think" is still dictating, Gennaro.

Liberal Democrat peer reveals self to be in own pocket

You'll recall our friend Lord Clement-Jones, who effectively attempted to cede law-making powers to a few record companies by pasting the BPI's choice of wording as an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill?

It turns out that along with offering Sony and Universal the chance to have a go at writing a law, he also neglected to mention that when he's not nipping into the Lords to tell us what to do, he works - sort-of - for a legal firm that isn't disinterested in the issue of copyright law:

Lord Clement-Jones is a partner at DLA Piper, which has worked closely with the FA Premier League to clamp down on websites offering live coverage of football games without the organisation's permission, and also advised Universal Music about its digital music plans. The amendment he moved could have resulted in YouTube being blocked.

It's not just the laws of common decency that suggests he might have mentioned that he had a financial interest in extending the boundaries of copyright law; it's also the rule of the Lords, too.

When The Guardian asked him how come he never mentioned this at the start of the debate, as he's supposed to, the noble Lord had a bit of a bluster:

Clement-Jones said it would be "completely ludicrous" for him to declare an interest before every debate which might touch upon the activities of DLA Piper's clients. "When did you ever see a partner in a law firm declare their partnership before the beginning of the debate?" he said.

"Do you know how many clients we have in DLA Piper? Thousands upon thousands. We have 70 offices across the world, we act for every side of the argument: for content providers, internet service providers, technical companies who provide the hardware, software, a massive range. It would be completely ludicrous.

"I am not particularly sympathetic to the idea that I have got to stand up and tell everybody that I am the partner in DLA Piper every time I open my mouth."

No, that might be a bit of a faff, I can see that. Here's an idea though: if you have thousands and thousands of reasons why your interventions in the Lords might intersect with one of your clients, why don't you remain sitting down and keep quiet? Better yet, how about turning in your furry collar and stop embarrassing the Liberal Democrats by being neither liberal nor democratic.

Liberal Democrat peer takes dictation from BPI

Here's some murky behaviour from the Liberal Democrats: it turns out that Lord Clement-Jones has added a clause to the Digital Economy Bill that's virtually word-for-word a BPI proposal.

That's right: a bloke who's never been elected sticking clauses into a bill written by a lobbying group representing international businesses. Don't you love democracy?

From MediaGuardian:

Today a spokesman for the BPI insisted that the organisation was not embarrassed at the disclosure of the source of the amendment.

"This was a suggestion that we made to the government in 2009, with this wording. This version of the proposal was sent to the government and also to the opposition parties. The government decided it wanted to go a different way. The opposition parties, while not fully agreeing with it, saw it as a good framework for what they wanted to put down," the spokesman said. "We have consistently said that the digital economy bill should have sensible measures to deal with peer-to-peer file sharing."

Clement-Jones had added a few extra words, but effectively, he's just got the BPI to do his homework for him. And ended up handing in work that's fundamentally flawed.

RIAA use charity album in piracy battle

An angry RIAA post wails that unlicensed music sharers are stealing bread from the victims of the Haiti earthquake:

On the heels of the encouraging news high that the “Hope for Haiti Now” charity album became the first all-digital record to top Billboard’s 200 music sales chart, we’ve also learned that there is a group of P2P users who are uploading and downloading the charity album illegally.

As the “Reaching new lows – charity album piracy” post on James Gannon’s IP, Innovation and Culture blog notes, the album is now widely available on illicit BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and more. The posting highlights a truly ugly side of P2P piracy – the undermining of humanitarian fundraising efforts via online theft of the “Hope for Haiti Now” compilation. So much for the notion that illegal downloading (“sharing”) is an effort to help advance the plight of artists.

That last sentence doesn't actually make sense, does it?

It's possible that people are downloading the album and sending the money straight to charity. Unlikely, but possible.

But hang on a moment... are the RIAA even right about this? Music Ally holds the claims up to the light:

I wondered just how popular the album is on file-sharing networks. It might be available, but how many people are downloading it? So I asked someone best placed to answer that question – Eric Garland of BigChampagne, which tracks activity on these networks.

“Yes, the charity record is available online, on torrent sites and one-click hosting etc, but the interest/volume is relatively low – nothing like a big pop record,” he says. And he pulled out some stats to show the comparative downloads of Hope For Haiti Now and Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster to show it.

At its peak on 24th January, Hope For Haiti Now was being downloaded 2,680 times a day according to BigChampagne – compare that to The Fame Monster’s 63,845 downloads the same day. Meanwhile, by 23rd February, Hope For Haiti Now’s daily downloads had dwindled to 820, compared to 47,971 for the Gaga album.

So there are a few people helping themselves - presumably the sort of people who wouldn't have bought the album even if it hadn't been available free - but most people are leaving it untouched on the networks.

The evidence, then, suggests that people who use unlicensed files are quite decent in their behaviour when it comes to a charity album. Certainly no worse than a music industry cartel using half-truths and crocodile tears about a charity album to try and advance their political position.

WiFi fine unfair

This shows what a horrific mess the pushing of more and more weight onto copyright law had created: a pub in the UK has been fined £8,000 after a customer downloaded copyrighted material through the free wi-fi service:

According to internet law professor Lilian Edwards, of Sheffield Law School, where a business operates an open Wi-Fi spot to give customers or visitors internet access, they would be "responsible in theory" for users' unlawful downloads, under "existing substantive copyright law".

However, she said the measures that would be brought in under the Digital Economy Bill — measures that could include disconnection of the account holder — would not apply because the business could be classified as a public communications service provider, which would make it exempt. According to the terms of the bill, only "subscribers" can be targeted with sanctions.

Except that under those laws, the "service provider" would then be lumbered with the task of trying to find out who had done the supposed copyright breach to pass those details on to the intellectual property owners, which is going to be even more messy.

The name of the pub hasn't been made public; nor has the name of the corporation who - presumably well aware they were going after an entity which had done no actual wrong itself - greedily slammed in a claim. We're told over and over how we must support the copyright holding companies because they are so very, very good for the economy: is it really good for the economy to have companies in stretched market sectors being forced to shovel out eight grand for a minor infraction by someone who might not even have been one of their customers?

People who like music spend more money on music - survey

It's been repeated, and found by surveys, so often it barely constitutes 'news', but it's nevertheless timely that a Virgin Media funded survey again reports that people who use unlicensed music also spend more on licensed music, too:

The study - funded by Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) - says a third of adults go illegal. But the additional money they spend contributes £200 million to the music economy each year.

The survey only spoke to a 1000 people, but it was carried out by Demos so had a fairly rigorous methodology.

French Record Label boss suggests that UK does like France

The government is hosting an event called, I'm afraid, C&binet today. (Creativity & Business International Network is the reversed-out long form of the not-quite-an-acronym there.)

One of the speakers was Jean Bernard-Levy, head of Vivendi, taking the opportunity to push three strikes onto the agenda. After all, that's how it's done back home in France:

Levy [...] said that while it was too soon to gauge the results of the introduction of the "three-strikes" policy in France, it was a necessary step to protect content owners.

Righto. Let's just consider that.

There's not been any time to judge if it works, but it's necessary. Whether it works or not.

"Britain should be more in favour of developing the media industries and even if France is ahead in legislation it should be obvious [that the UK should] be doing something like three strikes," he added.

Why "obvious"? And where does the idea that throwing people off the internet will lead to a developed media industry actually come from?

Levy said Vivendi, despite owning one of France's largest internet service providers (ISPs), telecoms operator SFR, was convinced the tough legislative strategy would not harm internet use. He added that he expected no real reduction in legal web traffic.

Really? There's all these pirates who need to be chased off the net, and yet chasing them off won't actually make a difference to the levels of web traffic? Does Levy believe that people who make unlicensed copies only use their computers for evil? Or is it just that there are such a very small number of people who would be affected by the law as to make no significant difference to anything?

Vivendi owns an ISP as well as a record label:

"There is no way at Vivendi that there is an internal debate – the priority is to reward and monetise content. The priority is not to grow traffic on ISPs," Levy said.

Well, that's good news for Vivendi. If you were a company whose main business was in telecommunications rather than content, you might wonder why a person with a foot in two camps is being allowed to make the running with deciding that content is more important than connectivity. It's like a person who runs a grocery deciding that cheese is going to be produced at the expense of beef, and expecting the butchers to agree with him because he has a meat counter himself.

And didn't you just say Levy that this wasn't going to affect traffic on the web? Why, all of a sudden, does three strikes have a priority?

Come to that, while you can see why Vivendi might decide this should be a priority, is it societally better for people who own the means of communication to decide they should be used primarily for enriching record companies instead of driving upwards the number of people using the internet? Wouldn't it be better for all industries if ISPs were trying to make getting online as easy and convenient as possible for the largest numbers, instead of focusing their efforts on trying to squeeze a few extra quid out of an old Peter Gabriel album?

Levy, naturally, doesn't worry about the human rights questions of disconnecting people from a source of democratic and civil engagement:

"When you send warning letters to people then they can't say they did not know [they were breaking the law]. It is a short-term view to say 'I don't want to hurt the public'."

Good lord, imagine taking such a short-term view as not wanting to hurt actual people, instead of the long-term view of Vivendi's share price. Do you think Vivendi would ever have been involved in bribing politicians in Milan if they'd ever stopped to worry about such short-term views? Or having a go at price-fixing.

He added that for the music industry, models such as Spotify's "freemium" strategy, where users can choose between free streamed songs with advertising or paying a subscription to avoid ads, had "yet to be proven profitable" despite the mass hype.

Ah, so we've not seen any proof that three strikes work, but we must just accept that it does; however, we've not seen any proof that freemium delivers profits, so we should assume that it doesn't. That seems fair.

Incidentally, how can the music industry not be making a profit from Spotify? It's not like every record is having to be re-recorded or re-promoted? Levy seems to be arguing that if you eat yesterday's leftover pizza for lunch, you're not saving any money.

Nice filesharing server you've got here. Be a pity if anything happened to it.

Meet DigiRights solutions, a company whose business plan seems to verge on blackmail:

After initially running through some pretty mundane stats about how much online piracy is costing copyright owners, the DRS presentation goes through their process of finding and pursuing users who illegally download songs and movies. They explain that after they find the alleged downloader, they send out an email demanding a payment of 450 euro ($650) per file. DRS keeps 80% of whatever they collect thus leaving 20%, or 90 euro ($130) per download, for copyright holders.

Then suddenly the presentation turns into a pitch comparing the profitability of legal and illegal downloads. Ernesto goes on to report :

“A legal online purchase of a song brings about €0.60 into the pockets of the copyright holders compared to the €90 per alleged file-sharer that pays up. So, the copyright holders get 150 times more from pursuing filesharers than from selling actual music, the company claims.

Yes, why bother selling stuff when you could just leave the door of the shop open, wait for people to help themselves, and then send some thugs round to threaten them into handing over their life savings?

Hopefully, even the record labels might draw the line at this behaviour. Right? Theu would, wouldn't they?

Bring in three strikes, and the terrorists have won

For a while now, the default piracy/terrorism line has been that terrorists are making their money from flogging dodgy DVDs down the car boot sale. This has always had the scent of eau du unlikely - do you know how many wonky copies of Marley And Me you'd have to flog in order to even buy the briefcase to put your dirty bomb into?

Now, though, it turns out that MI5 are worried that a big crackdown on internet filesharing could help the terrorists. Not because filesharers would go back down the car boot sale to buy their copies of Rain by Mika, but because it would drive take-up of encryption:

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have suggested public resistance to such prying could prompt many more to encrypt their internet connection and make monitoring more difficult, The Times reports.

As well as obscuring traffic to current analytical techniques, widespread encryption would also damage the case for the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), an ongoing multibillion-pound, cross-government attempt to to increase surveillance of the internet.

"The spooks hate it. They think it is only going to make monitoring more difficult," a source involved in drafting Lord Mandelson's Digital Economy Bill told the paper.

I'm not quite sure that MI5 would really be that bothered - surely if the technology exists already, any half-decent terrorist would be using it already? Presumably the fear is that, at the moment, if you're scrambling your electronic doings, that might look a bit dodgy; in the future, for everyone sending plans to send a kitten packed with explosives into a kindergarten, there's going to be a hundred thousand people merely cloaking their search for a copy of The Ohio Players doing Rollercoaster. It's almost as if MI5 are arguing that the power to scramble online should really be left to the criminals.

Open letter to Lily Allen

Oddly, despite that, um, high-level conference, it turns out that Lily Allen still isn't speaking for all musicians:



This is Dan Bull's riposte.

Self-selecting subset of musicians propose pointless fudge, congratulate selves

It's important to remember that - even although members of the FAC, Lily Allen and Sandie Shaw turned up and had a lovely vote last night, to talk of this as somehow representing the views of musicians is confusing "a few acts on major labels" with "musicians", and so should be read as another subset of interested parties rather than a representative approach.

But what did they decide last night?

After a three-hour meeting in London, the Featured Artists Coalition, which emerged as a breakaway lobby group in the summer, backed the government's proposed introduction of "technical measures" to combat the rising tide of copyright theft. If they ignore two warning letters, persistent illegal filesharers should have their broadband connections throttled "to a level which would render filesharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access", according to a statement after the meeting.

Well, that's just a pointless, meaningless fudge, isn't it? Either you throttle the connection to the point where it has an effect - which will mean it'll stop anything worthwhile happening online, which is the same as removing web connection altogether - or you'll just leave those accused by the music industry able to use the web in a meaningful way, which makes it an empty threat.

There doesn't seem to be any point in this suggestion. Either you believe that the right to participate in society and access to communications is a basic human right, or you don't. It's like proposing a punishment for drunk-drivers which would see them still able to drive, but with a speed limiter that stops them going above ten miles an hour.

Meanwhile, UK Music have sent a letter to Lord Mandelson which, once again, proves they don't actually understand the technology in which they profess to be expert:

"We support government proposals which would see internet service providers (ISPs) send notifications and apply technical measures to impede and discourage the use of unlicensed peer-to-peer networks and to encourage the use of legitimate services.

"We agree that a clear distinction should be made between how technical measures are applied to the casual infringer, compared to how they are applied to the persistent infringer, with temporary suspension of broadband accounts being applicable only as a last resort."

"The use of unlicensed peer-to-peer networks"? Do UK Music not really understand the difference between the peer-to-peer network (which may or may not be licensed) and the sharing of files without copyright owner's permission? Do they really not understand the problem they're trying to "solve"? Are they suggesting that the networks themselves need to be licensed, rather than the files?

It's insulting to call Sharkey and his chums Luddites. At least Ned Ludd understood the technology he was attacking.

Lily Allen quits the battle

"Cry God for England, Harry and... you know what? You lot are here now, I'm going to bugger off back to the tent and watch the football. Good luck."

Yes, almost to the second as we were saying that you had to at least admire Lily Allen for engaging with the process, no matter how wonkily, she was pulling out of the debate:

The singer posted messages on Twitter saying she was not going to attend an emergency meeting of music artists this evening to hammer out a unified position on illegal filesharing.

The star says: "Hello, there is a meeting today in London where artists are meeting to discuss Piracy. My job done.

"I wont be attending the meeting because it's going to be a press frenzy and I don't want to detract from the issues. I'm proud of the fact that I've been involved with this debate but I'm passing the baton on to other artists.

"And I've shut down the blog, the abuse was getting too much."

You've got to love the idea that the press might be able to cope with thedrummerfromBlur and Billy Bragg, but it would the very presence of Lily Allen so dazzling it would be unable to keep its mind on the details. And didn't the whole idea of the "Lily Allen Filesharing Battle Blog" kind of play on Lily Allen attracting interest?

Did Allen really see her "job" as having somebody else arrange a meeting? Because I don't remember there being a strapline on the blog saying "trying to get The Futureheads and Natasha Khan (if she's not on tour) in a pub talking"?

And even if the "abuse" (people disagreeing with her) is too hard to take, why has Allen taken down the site? All those musicians taking time to write down their perspectives on filesharing - only for Allen to put them online for two minutes and then whip them down. How does that help the debate at all?

The sense is that Allen suddenly realised she'd waded well out of her depth and has decided to bail before finding herself having to respond to questions rather than just angrily moaning when caught out.

Perhaps she realised that 'artists who want to get paid should get a fair market rate' is uncontroversial, and that the real question is what that fair market rate is.

Mandelson enjoys record industry day out; sings record industry song

How lovely for Lord Mandelson to have a day trip out to the music industry PR establishment, The Brits School. Once again, he's taken the opportunity to try and normalise the idea that private companies should have the power to demand people are thrown off the internet:

“Downloading somebody’s work without paying for it – whether it be music, film or computer games – is not a victimless act. It poses a genuine threat to our creative industries and to the livelihoods of talented, hard-working people striving to get a foothold in them. It’s essential that the voice of young artists is also heard,” he said.

“In the end this problem will be solved not simply by new laws but by new approaches to doing business. We believe that temporary account suspension as a last resort, in the most serious cases, is worth considering to allow these new business models to develop.”

The mention of new approaches to doing business is welcome - because, when your business has changed beyond recognition and the market price of your basic product has fallen to almost zero, that's what you have to do. The banging the drum of the "temporary" suspension - and will we ever get to see a suggestion of what 'temporary' might mean? - suggests that the message hasn't really got through.

Do I need to run through again the arguments why downloading a file might actually be victimless act? (Mainly, because there's no direct correlation between an unpaid download and a lost sale.) Do I need to run through again why it's just possible that upholding a four-company cartel throttling the access to the marketplace might not be the best way to give artists a chance to be heard? Why filesharing can offset some of the skewing of the market in favour of the Big Four?

It's forgiveable that Lily Allen waffles and pops when talking about filesharing - as I've said before, however wrong she might be, she's at least engaged with the process. But Mandelson is supposed to understand this sort of thing, and he's making the policy - and yet he gives no indication he's thought about this any further than reading through a discussion paper, funded by the intellectual property industry, over a good lunch, also funded by the intellectual property industry.

Microsoft come up with idea to make music "better"

Microsoft have lagged behind Apple in the music stakes, but they've come up with a cracking new idea to put themselves at the heart of the modern music world: they're coming up with a way to put DRM in peer-to-peer shared music.

Yes, that's right: you'll not only pay for the infrastructure and the data costs of the music sharing, but thanks to Microsoft, you'll also not actually own the tracks. Who couldn't fail to love that idea?

Information Week is saying this idea could "revive" peer-to-peer networks, as if they'd somehow vanished in the face of RIAA lawsuits. It's unlikely to even revive DRM, to be honest. Users have constantly made it clear they don't like digital locks - it's unlikely that they're going to embrace a system which expects them to distribute the padlocks when somebody else has the keys.

PRS says that there's some file sharing going on

The PRS has spent a little more of songwriter's money on a big report that announces that there's a whole lot of unlicensed music transfers going on:

The songs of popular musicians like Lady Gaga have been passed on 14 million times each in one year alone with no payment to the artist, according to a report by PRS for Music, the organisation that collects royalties for songwriters and composers.

That clunkily-written standfirst suggests that this is basically a report which attempts to stick a made-up number on downloading. And it is. Oddly, the actual report doesn't appear to be on the PRS website at the moment, which means we are stuck seeing it through the Telegraph's eyes:

The research involved analysing billions of swaps on global music sites like Pirate Bay and its findings illustrate just how rampant illegal filesharing has become.

On average the most popular files were swapped over 14 million times for the twelve-month period.

What does that actually mean, though - "on average"? And how were these "billions" of swaps get "analysed"? And how, exactly, were any of these swaps "on" Pirate Bay?

The Telegraph piece is written by Urmee Khan, who has the title Digital and Media Correspondent, and yet they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how the Pirate Bay works. It's a bit like having an agricultural correspondent who says that potatoes grow on bushes - it's near enough, but suspiciously wrong.

According to the authors, the Pirate Bay trial - where its founders were jailed - did little to dampen illegal activity from the popular site which advises people on the best ways to download the latest films, music and video games.

It's a search engine, Urmee. Yes, there is a 'how do I download' page, but it's very basic.

And the founders have been given a prison sentence, but haven't yet, actually, been jailed.

Still, it's nice to see the PRS has spent songwriter money on an expensive survey which just confirms that the Pirate Bay trial did not a piece of good for anyone's bottom line. Indeed, it's hard to see what the point of this work is at all. Lots of people share files, and many of those files result in no payment going to the artist. Do they think that there is anyone on the planet who would care about this, and yet doesn't know?

I get that the PRS thinks that, by saying "ooh, there's millions of swaps every second", they'll spark some of sort of crackdown, but really they're doing the opposite. Sticking out a press release which shows that billions of files are being swapped all the time, and that even a high-profile prison sentence can't dent the levels of activity, really just underlines how the PRS and the RIAA have totally lost. This should spark a big shake-up - but the shake-up is needed for the copyright capitalists to admit their business has changed forever.