Our main story today, surrounding how on earth the problem of illegal music downloads is going to be tackled, is one that even close industry observers can see absolutely no resolution to. The positions of the music industry, the internet service providers and internet users are so deeply entrenched that it's hard to see how a consensus could ever be reached.
The fact that it's the top story across British newspapers this morning is an indication of how endemic music piracy is, and how a creative industry as colossal as the British music business has been reduced to a quivering, pleading wreck of its former self.
Some news outlets have chosen this morning to announce how the big six ISPs have signed up to a Government pledge to crack down on music piracy – but what this actually amounts to is merely the sending of a letter to those who they suspect of being miscreants. Now, it's possible that customers who receive this slapped wrist from their ISP will suddenly change their behaviour, but these letters are, essentially, toothless – because it can't be decided what should then happen if the offender continues to download.
And, let's face it, the downloading will continue. Whenever these discussions rear their head – as they do, incredibly frequently – it strikes me that the official voices such as the Government, the ISPs and the music industry representatives, are utterly unable to put themselves in the position of being an illegal downloader of music. I can go online, right now, and within five minutes download pretty much any piece of recorded popular music that I want. It would probably be a neat party trick, if everyone else wasn't already aware of the fact that you can do it.
The quantity of uncontrolled distribution of mp3s is just astonishing. It's so huge, that any attempt to stop access to it will quickly be circumvented, because you have millions of geeks out there, all dedicated to keeping the ship afloat in the face of a few impotent industry bodies. When the BitTorrent tracker called Oink was taken down a few months back, its users were appalled. But to imagine that they're all now in HMV spending their hard earned pennies is naive. They've all just moved on to another tracker – or Limewire, or Soulseek, or any other peer-to-peer system.
Everyone has simply become used to getting something for nothing, in a way that's almost too massive to comprehend. It's the biggest shoplift in history. Of course, the arguments that filesharers put forward for the righteousness of their activities are, without exception, utterly ludicrous. They see themselves as "sticking it to the man" (not helped when U2's manager calls for his band to be recompensed for file sharing – U2!) without realising that smaller artists suffer far more, and depend on recouping their meagre advances in order to carry on making music rather than going back to working in Halfords.
The filesharers then claim that no, it's OK, because the bands can make their money doing gigs, which is like indignantly saying to the owner of your local corner shop, after you've been spotted nicking a bottle of wine, that it's OK, he can sell a few toilet rolls instead. Yes, The Rolling Stones might well gross millions on a world tour, but the majority of bands - even ones you would probably deem "successful" – lose money hand over fist while on the road. It's a well established fact: record companies have, for years, had to prop up the live music scene by paying tour support to bands – money which is then clawed back from their royalties. But those royalties aren't coming in like they used to.
But after you've pointed all this out, the filesharer just says "well, bollocks to it, I'm just going to do it anyway. Everyone else is." And that's the point. Everybody is doing it. The government can't be seen to criminalise the majority of the population, so they propose the broadband levy. And, as we saw when such a plan was proposed in Canada, rather than gratefully welcome the proposal, the struggling industry balked at change. But, regardless of who is right and who is wrong, resisting change is futile.
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No it won't, for a number of reasons.
1. Many bands are happy to have their shows taped and shared. Foremost amongst these (were) the Grateful Dead and their various offshoots. Indeed, they encouraged it by formally allowing taping at their shows.
So - this is LEGAL filesharing.
2. How then will an ISP know, when I am sharing files, that the music is legal or not?
3. All the more so, as the Bittorent protocal is now encrypted - so the ISP has NO idea of the nature of the data being shared.
4. I then confuse matters more by using Peer Guardian, which blocks unwanted IPs from snooping on my file sharing.
5. I then also use an anyonymous proxy, so that others have no idea of my real IP address.
In other words, it can't work and it won't work.
Conclusion - the Grateful Dead, as radical a band in their being AND their business set-up, have used the free exchange of their live shows to garner sales of their "produced" output. The music business needs to catch up with the hippies, and get real. Share. Or die. That's the deal.
Posted by: Jeremy Poynton | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 11:40 AM
Whatever the morality and legal situation the music companies have lost this one.
The way forward for real musicians that want to make an honest living is either a site like Magnatune, or setting up their own, which might bring a small income from fans, plus live performances.
If that means fewer megastars, fewer millionaire producers, fewer accountants, managers, and assorted hangers-on, I can live with that.
Posted by: Phil Thane | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 11:41 AM
Big problem with your (and many others) basic premise that filesharing = shoplifting.
It is as the name might indicate 'sharing' If I buy a book and lend it to a friend to read I don't hear the publishers bleating about 'illegal sharing'
Similarly if a buy a CD and lend it to someone the royalties have been paid along the line. The fact that it is digital is something this inept government cannot get their heads around.
Seems to me the industry is a greedy corporate blood sucker that wants to maximise profits because it cannot be bothered to adapt to new technologies and has gone cap in hand to Brown and co.
Remember the farcical 'home taping is killing music' campaign nonsense?
The fact that your article supports these big corporations is unbelievable and naive.
Posted by: Andy Nicholls | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 11:47 AM
All those precautions, yet you sign your post on the Independent site with what is presumably your real name, 'Jeremy Poynton'.
I'm assuming it's your real name; if it's made-up, you have a pretty mediocre imagination.
Posted by: moonpilot | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 11:53 AM
Moonpilot. So what. I can cover my tracks, but I am not breaking the law. What I relate is a demonstration - for simple folk like yourself - that 1) filesharing need not be illegal and 2) that even if it is, they can't catch bright sparks.
Next?
Posted by: Jeremy Poynton | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 12:02 PM
there are 3 fundamental issues at work behind the apparent deadlock.
1. The ISPs in Britain, at least, is a wildly deregulted free market, sporning many ISP companies and jobs based on an income to a large extent provided by p2p internet users.
Any alteration of the current state of affairs could instantly kill off many ISPs and this is seen as a restricitive non-freemarket move by government, and bad for the National economy.
2. The issue of the degree and uses of censorship of the interent has been a big deal, largley because the birth of the internet was one of a new technology which symbolically and perhaps literally embodied the first completely free and unbound social space in history.
This ideological factor, namely how do you go about reducing and controling this incredible degree of freedom couples with the extraordinary nature of the technology itself. Governments in the west have shown remarkable caution about imposing limits on this brave-young-world as this is seen as pro-democratic. There exists a real fear that once you start to censor the internet, the flood gates will open, the tide will turn and it could be impossible to stop the nature of that censorship.
3. Lastly, the nature of the technology itself. Unique in it's ability to re-invent itself and a myriad of new solutions to today's context almost overnight. It is recognised that it is a good thing to allow this exceptional technical revolution to unfold according to it's own nature. Legislating to control a scenario today may prove futile & expensive where the whole context is altered by the re-manipulation of data and data transfer technologies tomorrow, and where the industires that request governmental controls are also adopting the same said technical evolutions, sporning new employment industries and in cases heavily reliant on the people who invent and develop digital technology to remain innovative.
Posted by: nicholson | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 12:42 PM
Legality of free downloaded music and sharing apart;
Why should I who do not, have not downloaded anything apart from one album from itunes have to pay a premium on top of my broadband charges. I see no reason why I should be paying for someone elses actions.
I do not see why I, if I so chose to, cannot give to a friend something that I have purchased or been given by another. I can photocopy a photo or even a page in a book and give that to someone, why not a computer file.
Posted by: Dav john | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 12:59 PM
This is too little too late for this industry. If this had been offered 10 or even 5 years ago, it may have been accepted, but now it is nothing more than another tax, which if accepted will open the floodgates to a whole raft of new taxes.
The music industry has made a mess, and now the taxpayer is expected to pay to enforce their copyright and prop up thier profits for an industry that has shown itself to ruthlessly exploit it's customer with overcharging, gone out of it's way to crush competition to it's business model and has finally been beaten by lack of originality when faced with new technology. Now we're all meant to feel sorry for them and pay this new tax.
Let me tell you how this will go. Six ISP's are now going to spy on customers and report them to the BPI, who will then send out letters. The hardcore downloaders will laugh at them and do it all the more just to annoy them. In the face of possible legislation to disconnect or throttle connections, the geeks and hackers will develop more sophisticated peer to peer applications which will be anonymised, fully encrypted and essentially indecipherable. These systems are being developed today specifically to beat the like of the BPI, RIAA and MPAA and will make bit torrent look like these industry's best friend, as these systems will give no clue as to who is running each machine and specifically designed to prevent monitoring. Couple that with the possibility that Chinese, Russian and African nations who do not care about IP law could easily set themselves up as anonymized, encrypted hubs for music downloading for a very small payment through the likes of PayPal or prepay credit card, this would be meaningless to most people but very lucrative for them, and you can see that this and movie downloading is no longer stoppable.
In case you think access to P2P services removes revenue from the music and movie industry, I personally own over 3000 LP's, 700 CD's and almost 1000 DVD's, most of which were purchased used or heavily discounted, you see if the price is right, people will always buy!
Posted by: Michael Briggs | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 01:10 PM
Andy Nicholls: As per the original post, I don't believe that fat-cat industry or big corporations have a strong case; they've undoubtedly failed to move with the times. But quite why this notion persists that musicians have been rolling in cash for decades and now deserve their come-uppance, I've no idea. If the corporations are hurting, the musicians are hurting a great deal more. Only a minuscule fraction of a one percent of them are swanning around in luxury cars. The majority work bloody hard, and wouldn't mind a small cheque of recognition now and then.
Nor am I particularly criticising those who download commercially available recordings for free; they've essentially been handed access to the history of recorded music on a plate. Temptation is a powerful thing.
What I do object to are the laughable attempts to morally justify the "sharing" of commercially available recordings. For one thing, "sharing" is something of a misnomer - it's "making a digital copy". Defending the practice by claiming that it's just like lending someone a book - as two commenters on this thread have done - is ridiculous.
If you have a commercially available album on your computer connected to Soulseek or BitTorrent, you're not just sharing that with a mate down the road. You're sharing it with thousands of people. Nor can you compare it to the "home taping is killing music" campaign - which, as you say, was misguided - because this on a way, way bigger level.
There's no point in railing against those who download commercially available stuff for free. The practice is endemic. But those who do it, and then attempt to preach from the moral high ground, are simply deluded. These recordings used to cost money. Now you can get them for nothing. So you do. End of story. Just admit it, and carry on downloading.
Jeremy Poyton: As you say, filesharing need not be illegal. But the fact that the Grateful Dead are turning a blind eye to the free trading of live bootlegs online is pretty irrelevant. Show them the statistics of the revenue they've lost to people openly trading ripped mp3s of their albums, and they'll be as irritated as the next band.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 02:37 PM
Of course, when I said
"Sharing" is something of a misnomer - it's "making a digital copy"
I should really have said "'sharing' is something of a misnomer - it's 'allowing people to make a digital copy'". Pedantic, perhaps, but it's the kind of detail that people inevitably tear you to shreds over whenever this debate occurs...
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 02:47 PM
About time the music companies got there's.
Having worked at a major record label in the early 90s I keenly observed the attitude record company execs had for the paying public ... it wasn't too palatable. Remember the days of being fleeced £15.99 for chart albums in HMV despite the cost of producing said 'unit' being pennies..??
Plus, their attitude to musicians once they were deemd unprofitable was distastefull. No-one will mourn the death of the record company exec and their hand me down jobs .....
But, don't worry, musicians will always make music and find a way to distribute it - their primary focus being massaging their egos through the prism of fame rather than purely financial reward.
Posted by: Chris | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 03:03 PM
"Massaging egos through the prism of fame" doesn't put food on the table, though. Now, you might think that no-one actually deserves to make money out of something as frivolous as making a record or doing gigs, and that's fair enough, after all, it's not nursing or inner-city policing.
But this idea that music is no longer worth paying for hasn't been reached because people like it any less, or derive less pleasure from it. It's merely because they can swipe it via alternative means without forking out for it. So it might be convenient to say "don't worry about the musicians", but it doesn't really absolve those who've stopped paying for music from guilt, does it.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 03:16 PM
Jeremy Poyton: As you say, filesharing need not be illegal. But the fact that the Grateful Dead are turning a blind eye to the free trading of live bootlegs online is pretty irrelevant. Show them the statistics of the revenue they've lost to people openly trading ripped mp3s of their albums, and they'll be as irritated as the next band.
No need for mp3. Deadheads want the real thing - you don't see people trading mp3, as there is no need to. And if you need it for your whatever, there are any number of conversion programmes to do it.
So - a challenge - find me a deadhead selling mp3s of their music. The last one tried to sell a hard drive of mp3s on eBay, and was immediately shopped BY OTHER deadheads. Self policing. You'd better believe it.
Go see http://etree.org/legal.html
Etree.org complies with the Grateful Dead Production Inc. / Ice Nine's taping and digital transfer policy. Please read the following statement:
Message from Grateful Dead Productions, Inc. // Ice Nine
STATEMENT TO MP3 SITE OPERATORS:
The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely non-commercial exchange of music taped at our concerts and those of our individual members. That a new medium of distribution has arisen - digital audio files being traded over the Internet - does not change our policy in this regard.
Our stipulations regarding digital distribution are merely extensions of those long-standing principles and they are as follows:
*
No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means.
*
All participants in such digital exchange acknowledge and respect the copyrights of the performers, writers and publishers of the music.
*
This notice should be clearly posted on all sites engaged in this activity.
*
We reserve the ability to withdraw our sanction of non-commercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work.
Posted by: Jeremy Poynton | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 03:24 PM
Sorry Jeremy,
I'm sure the Grateful Dead and their fans are all fine, upstanding men who proudly and unselfishly stand at the cutting edge of music technology, but this issue has nothing whatsoever to do with the trading or selling of bootlegs.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 03:32 PM
Who are the Grateful Dead??
Rhodri - I am not advocating stealing from the musicians I'm just saying that I'm quite happy to see the record companies brought down to earth for a while. Streamline their bloated overpaid, over 'refreshed' organisations.
Posted by: Chris | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 04:11 PM
Michael Briggs - the Dead have been "in business" for over 40 years - succesfully. The various band members offshoot bands do the same. I suspect they know better than you do the commercial ramifications of their decision - you seem to be saying they are stupid. The evidence is quite otherwise ...
www.dead.net
Posted by: Jeremy Poynton | Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 06:09 PM
A few points come to mind reading this.
1. How are the ISPs supposed to know if I am engaged in illegal file sharing. There is plenty of music, video and other files out there that can can be shared using P2P software perfectly legally. I believe innocent until proven guilty should apply here as much as anywhere else so ISPs should not be allowed to take action against users unless they can PROVE that the user is not just sharing music, but is sharing copyrighted music.
2. The music industry massively exagerate the effects that file sharing is having on their revenues. Studies show that people who download copyrighted music illegally also tend to spend more on legal music that the general population. There are also studies that show that people are still quite happy to pay for entertainment. The ammount that people are spending is as high as ever, it is just that now DVDs and Computer Games are grabbing a larger slice of the pie. This is a lot more to do with the rise in popularity of DVDs than it is with illegal file sharing.
3. If you own an MP3 player there is currently no reasonable legal way to get get music onto it. It is illegal to copy music you already own on CD to your player and I think it is unreasonable to expect people to pay twice for the same music. Buying music with DRM is unsafe as if the service closes down at any point in the future you lose the ability to transfer your music to new devices which means if you buy a new PC or MP3 player you have to pay for all your music yet again. There is still a lot of music that is not available to buy for download and even where music is available to buy, it is frequently only available at relatively low bit rates.
The current situation is equivelent to saying that you can have a car for free, or if you are willing to pay you can have it with a speed limiter and you can be asked to hand it back at any time without notice or compensation.
Posted by: Andrew Wimble | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 09:28 AM
Andrew,
While you're technically right in saying that it's illegal to rip your CDs to MP3 and transfer them to your player, the Government are working to modify the law. No-one has ever been, nor will ever be prosecuted for doing it.
As for your second point, while the industry undoubtedly do exaggerate their revenue losses, there's never going to be a way of accurately measuring it. You can't even get an accurate measure of the number of tracks being downloaded for free.
These "studies" you mention might well reveal that older people who amass huge libraries of music feel a twinge of guilt and occasionally fork out for some CDs. There will always be middle-aged blokes who crop up in these discussions and say "yeah, I download - but when I download something I like, I go out and buy it." This doesn't mean, however, that it's widespread behaviour. And the reason the industry is white with fear is that a whole generation of kids are growing up knowing that actually, they don't have to pay for music, and there's no point in them doing so.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 09:40 AM
Right I checked out the GD on www.dead.net and still fail to see their relevance. This old band who were big in the sixties and who's singer died ages ago. Great.
Maybe we should look at Radiohead as a slightly more up-to-date example - a band that let the public decide how much to pay for their last album: In Rainbows. I paid a couple of quid for my copy as did many others. The fact of the matter is that I could have picked up the album free illeaglly but refrained from doing so -again as many others did. It's a common quote on blogs that people would feel guilty about stealing the album after the band had shown such respect for their audience. Despite Radiodead obviously being like mega rich there's a point buried in there somewhere.
Posted by: Chris | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 10:21 AM
Presumably most of the officials within the ISPs and music companies, were at some point teenagers who taped stuff from the radio and exchanged mix tapes with friends. Casual piracy never did anyone much harm then, and introduced many people to new bands. Downloading music is simply this generations mix tape and i'm sure does drive CD purchases to some extent.
Posted by: Les Greenhalgh | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 10:31 AM
"It's a common quote on blogs that people would feel guilty about stealing the album after the band had shown such respect for their audience."
It may be a common quote, but this notion of "guilt" is rapidly disappearing. Many will have said that to somehow absolve their guilt, and then just downloaded it for free anyway. Remember, 62% of downloads from the official site were gratis. And that doesn't take into account the massive numbers downloaded via BitTorrent, etc.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 10:32 AM
Les: There's no comparison here. It's not "casual piracy". It's not exchanging mix tapes. It's you or I, wanting to hear a song (virtually any song we can think of); downloading it for free; burning it to CD, transferring it to an MP3 player, whatever, and never having to pay for it. Ever.
Once again: I'm not criticising the practice. I'm just astounded that people try to justify it by saying that it's only like taping stuff off the radio, when it manifestly isn't.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 10:37 AM
Jeremy: Please re read my post, you'll find I make no comments regarding the Grateful Dead, in fact I applaud their attitude to taping at their concerts.
They might be considered old hippies by some, but I know their fan base is incredibly solid, very loyal and they have remained a successful group for longer than most people in the music industry have known how to walk and talk. Maybe if more groups and artists had a similar attitude to their fans, then maybe the music industry would not be flapping so much about the file sharing issue.
Posted by: Michael Briggs | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 10:38 AM
It's an interesting point, Michael. Bands whose audiences are older - and, conceivably, more "loyal" - have really been able to use the net to their advantage, with Marillion, and to a lesser extent Radiohead, being the prime examples.
But this isn't to do with the bands' attitude to fans. Bands have always known which side their bread is buttered; they depend on people giving them money in exchange for music.
This is more to do with the fans attitude to the bands. Fandom of emerging groups isn't really based on a financial transaction any longer. I adore the Dirty Projectors more than any band I've seen in the past 10 years but, if I didn't want to, I wouldn't have to buy their wonderful records. Because they're all up on Soulseek.
And, increasingly, I wouldn't feel guilty about downloading them. I don't know why. It's just a slowly changing attitude that's spreading, unstoppably, through music consumers worldwide.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 10:56 AM
Regardless of the legal credentials of downloading - the majority of those who download are doing so because they wouldn't have paid for the music/film in the first place. The only thing that it does do is generate awareness for the band - such as "I downloaded CSS's new albumn the other day - it was so good I think I might go see them on tour."
Posted by: Richard Townsend | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 02:16 PM
"The majority of those who download are doing so because they wouldn't have paid for the music/film in the first place."
Obviously, this kind of statement is utterly impossible to prove one way or the other. The only thing you can say for certain is that downloading is rampant because a) it's easy, and b) people in general would rather not spend money if they don't have to.
And once they have downloaded it, even if they love it, there's certainly no incentive for them to go and buy a copy.
For every person who says "I downloaded CSS's new album the other day - it was so good I think I might go see them on tour", there are several hundred, if not thousand, who say "I downloaded CSS's new album the other day - it was so good I'm going to download their debut album, too."
And if they must, well, they must, but again, they shouldn't try and claim that they're somehow doing the band a favour. Listening to a freely downloaded set of mp3s in your bedroom no more supports a band than having a pleasant dream about them.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 02:37 PM
Just downloaded Grateful Dead's Greatest Hits.
Rubbish.
Posted by: chris | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 02:39 PM
Chris, that actually made me snort Diet Coke onto my keyboard. I'll send you the clean-up bill.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Friday, 25 July 2008 at 02:41 PM
Whether you're for or against, free downloads are here to stay. Independent artists without the backing of big budget A&R departments HAVE to give at least some music away for free as a marketing tool. Hats off to them I say. But I'd keep well away from torrents and sites like Limewire, get your mp3 downloads legally, that is if you want to keep the right side of the RIAA :)
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