The Net closes in on internet piracy
Seven million downloaders face being branded criminals in new government drive. Jane Merrick reports
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AFP
Lilly Allen: 'There are musicians struggling - they're getting dropped much quicker. Those responsible are those downloading music illegally. There is no money going to bands any more'
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Seven million people could be criminalised under government plans to crack down on internet piracy, to be included in this autumn's Queen's Speech. The illicit downloading of music and films on the internet, a practice engaged in by one in 12 of the population, could lead to severe restrictions on internet access and a fine of up to £50,000.
Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, is said to be persuaded by the argument for tough laws to curb illegal file-sharing after an intensive lobbying campaign by influential people in the music and film industry.
But Tom Watson, the former minister for digital engagement, today criticises the proposed crackdown as extreme and calls for a more measured approach that would target those who uploaded illegal content, rather than the millions who downloaded the files.
His intervention comes in the week after the Pirate Party, which won a European parliamentary seat in Sweden in June on a platform of legalising internet file-sharing, announced it would fight the next general election in Britain.
The new Pirate Party UK was reported to be recruiting as many as 100 people every hour since its launch last week. Among its supporters was Stephen Fry, who applauded the new party on Twitter. Yesterday the organisers said they had 259 fully paid-up members, although hundreds more had shown an interest in joining.
When the Digital Britain report was published in June, the Government appeared to row back from a hardline stance on illegal downloading. But a consultation document on the latest plans, which could be tagged on to a Bill in the next Queen's Speech, makes it clear that ministers favour tough sanctions.
Whitehall sources said that Lord Mandelson has been persuaded by the need to take action to prevent copyright being breached. But Mr Watson, writing below, says: "Not only do the sanctions ultimately risk criminalising a large proportion of UK citizens, but they also attach an unbearable regulatory burden on an emerging technology that has the power to transform society, with no guarantees at the end that our artists and our culture will get any richer.
"Working on the safe assumptions that (a) people like downloading music from the internet, and (b) most people would prefer not to break the law, we should aim to map a way forward for businesses to take financial advantage of the digital market."
Under the proposed laws, Ofcom, the industry regulator, would be given powers to require internet service providers to collect information on those who downloaded pirate material. The data would be anonymous, but serious repeat infringers would be tracked down through their computer ID numbers.
Individuals would be hit by restricted internet access – from slowing down broadband to blocking access altogether – and could face fines of up to £50,000.
The Department for Business consultation document admits that getting internet service providers to track down repeat offenders "is new and will be contentious". Nevertheless, the crackdown has the backing of leading figures in the music, film and publishing industries. The singer Lily Allen has said: "If what the consumer wants is good music, then they are going to have to start paying for it. There are people really struggling to make their way; they're getting dropped much quicker, not being given the opportunity to make second albums. The only people responsible are those who are downloading music illegally, because there is no money going towards the bands any more."
But those on the other side of the argument say that file-sharing – sometimes termed "p2p" or "peer to peer" – is merely widening access to a piece of music or film and does not equate to theft. Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, has in the past given implicit support for internet piracy. He told an interviewer: "A lot of the time, the reason that people pirate is they want access to good music and they don't get it because the radio is so shit."
Andrew Robinson, the leader of the Pirate Party UK, said yesterday that the new laws would be a gross intrusion into civil liberties, and would penalise people in the same household as those who had broken the law.
Mr Robinson, 40, a graphic designer and part-time musician, is planning to stand in his home constituency of Worcester, where the Labour MP Michael Foster is defending a majority of 3,144. He said: "This is about proving to the major parties that there are so many votes to be had in adopting policies like ours. The pro-copyright lobby is very powerful."
The Pirate Party UK was officially recognised as a political party by the Electoral Commission last month. It is not linked to the Pirate Bay internet "torrent" site but is sympathetic to its cause. Pirate Bay does not host illegal content but provides links to files of music and videos held on individuals' computers.
Additional reporting by Alex Steger and Eve da Silva
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Comments
When will an Anti Tax Party be availiable?
Who dosen´t want everything for free?
And who is available to create/work for free?
Who is going to feed de providers/creatores of all that´s stolen via net?
We are all aware of parties that make promisses that are'nt forfilled, but can any one belive that the Pirate Party will at any time give us good quality filmes/musics produced by them, are they going to win all the lottery draws?
Artists such as morrisey are enraged by the fact that his own work is being sold, & he sees nothing whatsoever of the profits. The pirate party want to REFORM the laws that allow this to happen. I suggest you have a read at the core policies again, if you did in the first place.
http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/
Where we differ:
1st core policy – The artists should always have the benefit of their work, we shouldn’t treat them as babies, like any normal person in the real world, business transactions can be well made or not, that’s why lawyers/managers exist, if it goes wrong the first time, you know where not to go to the next time. There is no need for a party to protect artists, everyone needs protection.
2nd core policy – ‘excessive surveillance’ (?) only the wrong doers need to bother with the excessive part of surveillance. I understand that London is one of the cities of the world with more surveillance cameras on the streets, and the surveillance wasn’t quiet enough to prevent the last terrorist attacks.
3rd core policy – (…modern equivalent of lending a book or a DVD to a friend.) The old equivalent was an original product that was lent, and it was to a real friend, physically, at a pub, school, work etc. these transactions had a very low pace, you could only lent it again to another real friend, when your first real friend, gave it back to you.
When you upload a movie you make it available to who ever wants’ it, to the guy who just spat on your face this morning, friends, to people you don’t know that exist and all for free, where is the share of the artist?
You are in contradiction with your 1st and 3rd policies.
People that are going to vote for you, are expecting free music and free films, say it any other way, and your party is dead at birth.
Remember, that only the rightful owner should be free to do what ever it feels like with its belongings.
If the car that you drive is yours, you are free to lent it to a friend, enemy, unknown, you can even rent it, destroy it, because it's yours.
A straw man if ever I saw one, and a very naive statement to boot. Leaving the copyright issues aside your logic seems to be that as you have nothing to hide you do not care to protect your privacy. Let me assure you that this is NOT a universally valid statement.
Surveillance as such can never prevent anything from happening, but liberties once surrendered are very hard to regain. Do you really feel more secure knowing that your emails can be read, your house surveilled and your phone tapped on an anonymous tip-off, all in the name of protecting you?
Getting back to the issue at hand I can't see that the Pirate Party are promising anything other than working to change current copyright law, a fairly modest goal when compared to what the established parties promise us all come election time...
Suppose that an Anti Tax Party should become available.
Suppose it gets 50% or more in the next elections.
The politicians wages wouldn't worry me.
But the garbage colectores would.
Abramoviche dosen't want to know.
But i'm bet you that the garbage man wants.
As a child, I loved the Thomas The Tank Engine books. But I was horrified to see their copyright being exploited by a company long after the author was dead. The company did not add anything to the Thomas idea, but they made (and continue to make) large sums of money from it.
Perhaps if copyright were only available for, say, twenty years after a work was published, there would be less temptation to pirate music/films/books.
The big companies (Sony, Warner Bros, etc) have a MacDonald’s approach to music (music as burgers) and couldn’t care less about artists that aren’t going to make them heaps and heaps of money.
A recent example I discovered (among countless, music and film) is ‘The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie’. A legendary film, much loved by all who know it, for which Maggie Smith won the best actress Oscar in 1969.
I wanted to see it, went to Amazon, and they don’t sell it on region 2 dvd. If you are really desperate you can get a dodgy region 1 American import that may or may not work on your system if you are lucky/unlucky, and you’ll have to wait weeks and weeks for it. And Lovefilm don't have it to rent
Yet it was available for me to see on YouTube that afternoon.
How does the great Maggie Smith benefit from that? How does this film’s marketplace non-existence represent her interests?
And why can’t the company that owns the copyright get around to making it available online, if some anonymous YouTuber can?
An artist produces an industry-recognised masterpiece and the big company that holds the copyright can’t even be arsed to release it. A great performance is effectively buried through a lack of imagination on an industrial scale.
And yet on Amazon I can buy as many Big Brother Highlights DVDs as I could ever want to view in a lifetime (alas, I don’t want!).
If it’s not going to sell a million copies in a week the big companies couldn’t give a monkey’s about representing any artist. The above case seemingly the proof.
The artist’s interests are not represented at all because the volume of sales likely to be generated by the release of her great film do no represent the interests of the company that holds the copyright. So, legitimately, this film does not exist and cannot be seen. And screw the artist.
Big media companies primarily represent their interests. Benefits for any artists they represent are just a fortunate side effect.
The sooner artists can cut big media companies out of the picture altogether (as Radiohead are trying to) the better it will be for all artists.
More than money, most artists (unlike media company execs) want their work to be available. Actors want their work to be seen and musicians want to be heard. But they also want to, and deserve to, earn a decent living for their efforts.
Sadly (despite much pseudo-altruistic whining about ‘supporting’ and ‘nurturing’ new artists) most record companies will only intervene in any artist’s career if they can see a fat enough profit margin in whatever that artist creates to keep them (and all their unimaginative and parasitic be-suited friends) in champagne forever, in return for them waving that promotional magic wand.
Buy direct from artist websites.
Use music downloading to hear and see the stuff that big media company controlled promotional institutions (Radio 1, Virgin FM, etc) don’t see a fat profit in promoting and won’t make available to you, and then do your best to buy it direct from the artist.
And go and see the new up-and-coming bands you like if they perform nearby and buy a CD, t-shirt, etc, directly from them if you wish them well.
Cat fell off the windowsill and put me off my stroke ;)
The problem with the government plans is that we are once again moving to a police state. We need a new leader, and I told Mr Brown that here:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/pl
Join the 70,000 strong army to fight Mr Brown, and sign the petition before he returns from holiday.
Incidentally there are legal sites where you can legally listen to music. Your PC has the ability to record anything that goes through it. Put the two together. Voila.
Exactly why sharing music on the net is encouraged by serious musicians and discouraged by lightweight ones who think we owe them a living (compare Thom Yorke's opinion to that of Lily Allen!). The great musicians know that if more people listen to their music then more people will then buy their CDs and attend their live performances. The lightweight musicians know that if more people listen to their dirge LESS people will buy their CDs and attend their concert. Some people have a calling and some people want to be famoius for something or other and are lucky enough to have a connected celebrity dad!
To take an example entirely at random: Lily Allen's album It's Not Me It's You is selling for £7.99 to download and £8.98 for the CD. The sound quality on the CD is around ten times better than the sound quality of the MP3 yet then record company still charges us as if they are a comparable product. They are not, and never will be.
And what is all this talk of piracy, anyway? It's not piracy unless money changes hands. What we have is the sharing of resources, a concept that this government, with its record, would do well to try to understand.
The more they legislate against this activity the more it will come back into the politicians faces. Sign up to the Pirate party - its not about pirating music and movies - its about free rights to view media as and when you choose.
because like 90% of people, i PAY for the msuic and movies I want to enjoy. So if your mate is free loading off me paying my way, then eys, lock him up, just like you would someone dodging car tax or income tax.
I have no sympathy for them.
Record companies need to realise that they are less popular than even bankers or politicians, as they do less for the human race and suck all the blood out of any artist they can get their hands on
if the big names (performers) in the entertainment industry didn't take so many millions out of it there would be more to spend on the up and coming performers.
how many millions do bono and his band need? elton john, etc. etc. in general it seems to me that these people aren't really interested in anyone except themselves.
Take Jerry Bruckheimer for an example, his productions are becoming less and less espectacular and rare, he his moving to TV produtions, who is losing?
The public that loved (and love) his kind of filmes, the box-offices prove it.
I agree that, old stuff (50 years+) should become of public domain, as it is with the rights of pharmaceutical discoveries, that can become cheaper as generics.
Would you invade his country to stop him/her downloading?
I don't think chinese know the meaning of copyright, i'm shore they don't have the word in their vocabulary.
That's why you can shop there anything, toys that are forbiden in the UK, movies that haven't seen a screen, milky poison, even medication that the only similarity with the original is the outside look of it.
That's the way of a 3rd world country, pirates could go and live there.
Standards cost money, we just have to chose where and how do we want to live,(if we have the means to).
The new model has led to the distribution of material that was previously never available. Each site attracts specialist fans who are mad about their genre. It's a community to learn all about the art form and view all the material. The sites keep full statisitcs on everything, including the populairty of each work's download. It's a global cottage industry setting up and running proffessional models on the basis they have market value if they went legitimate.
The p2p sites should be economically legalised as new outlets for the distribution of artisitic material.
1. A creative royalty levy should be deducted as a % from all monthly consumer ISP charges across global economic zones and poured into an artists royalty distribution fund on the basis of the popularity of their p2p downloads each month.
2. A % of any p2p website profit should also be levied for a contribution to this fund. This will keep the content free and subject to multi upload sources which keeps the content quality high,varied and constant and the participation of users guaranteed and potentially in the millions from across the globe. Advertisers could then find and asert a place in this new model to help provide much needed revenue and value to each p2p buisness.
Banning the network all together is madness. It destroys a new emeging economic model and global sector. It stops in it's tracks the development of technology. It further stops the potential increased distribution of many artist's previously rare or unavailable works, promotes specialist art form communities and potentially has a period of major growth yet to come which will create thousands of web-based jobs and comapnaies worth millions, and pass on more royalties to more artists than have ever previously been experienced or imagined.
The only losers in this equation are the old giants of the previous commercial cultural distribution model. Famous for denying artists royalties, over charging the consumers, dominating distribution by failing to make available vast stocks of material (Do you realise how many more films are available in the USA which are not distributed elsewhere ?) - The newly emerging model is the complete inverse of these practices with it's revolution of the method of the spreading of ideas equivilant to the invention of the printing press and the arrival of the book.
People want to download as its easier and, as long as its not too much of an onerous process and providing it is not hugely expensive then they'll prefer to do it legitmately. This legislation is all about supporting the vast corporate profits of the music industry who are too greedy and have too little vision to comtemplate an alternative revenue stream (one example being a pay per listen).
As far as the lesgialation is concerned it will be easily sidestepped using proxies and anonymous p2p. Only the non tech savvy people will get caught. It'll achieve little, cost a fortune to administer (the costs of which will be passed on from the ISPs to the rest of us at a time when the government is [supposedly] encoraging more ebusiness) and will achieve very little in terms of extra revenue for the record companies. Mandeleson does NOT have a mandate to propose anything.
Not all of this is good and some people manage to use the internet to further there criminal aims. a balance must therefore be reached.
The record companies are as much to blame for the rise in internet piracy because of there blatant greed and overpricing policies in the past. I can remember when CD technology gave the record companies a cheap medium to distribute music through. They chose to abuse this technology and maintained high prices and therefore excessive profits.
Now they can be bypassed and don't therefore have full control.
I personally prefer to listen to recorded CD's and have been made aware of new artists through legitimate internet sites. It is a powerful communication medium, I am sure the arttic monkeys will agree. which should be left alone for free expression and freedom of speech.
It's about time the entertainment industry started to use this new technology to there advantage, unfortunately, for them, they would also need to reduce there excessive prices and rely on more spin off business.
Criminalising seven million people is swimming against the tide, it will never work so find another way!!!!
The revolting Mandellsohn is acting in the interests of the corporations, not musicians.
Oh, and most of your tax goes to pay interest to the private international bankers who "loaned" the "government" money they created from thin air.
Oh that they had regulated themselves with such fervor.
What a bunch of stinking hypocrites.
If you use P2P you upload. That is usually how the companies charge people. Ignorance of the government ministers is one of the real problems in this area. They really need to talk to their kids more often.
Michael
This hasn't always been the case. It was technology - the vinyl record first and later the CD - that lead to where we are now. Over the last half of the 20th Centrury, music changed from something we listened to live or played ourselves into a commodity that we passively consumed.
The internet has changed that, just like the invention of high quality vinyl recordings probably kiled the sheet music market and reduced the nuber of jobbing musicians.
The record companies need to get real. They don't have any moral right to control music. A musician who produces music is lucky if he or she can make a living out of it but doesn't have a right to a guaranteed income from it if nobody wants to listen to it.
If musicians want to make a living in the new world order, they need to work out how to do it. Any good musician would have my support trying to do this. But sod the record companies. They can go to hell.
Copyright law is totally out of hand now. Its purpose like patent law was to encourage creativity not to guarantee vast profits to large corporations. My suggestion to everyone would be to simply stop buyomg - go on strike and let the music industry go hang. Intellectual property laws far from benefiting society are in reality a private tax on society.
When the music industry produces quality product that peoplle want they will do ok. The government should keep out of it and let the market decide, not simply be bought and paid for by the media industry.
Why should musicians get repeated payments for a piece of work? The rest of us have to work for a living.
The more they get the more goes on drugs and excess and the corporate moguls.
Musicians should care more about the creativity and qaulity of their work, there is so much rubbish out there. If they created something really good it would sell, period.
The majority in the creative arts if you can call it that live in a fantasy world and expect fantasy sums of money, fame, respect, adoration and a speakers platform.
It's the media companies that are driving this.
Let's focus on something important like ending war, famine and poverty.
The answer is in the past because music (managed by the labels) controlled distribution because they had privy to the technology. Now everyone can do it (burn/copy, etc) so all you need is one copy on the net and all will feed off it.
Reasonably done (with fair pricing by the manufacturers/distributors), the answer is about going back to a physical world, that of vinyl, I swear it.
RE: 'swaziorange' ... "Why should democratic countries allow Pirate Parties to exist?"
The 'entertainment industries' passé business models (TV,books/films and music) have been DEMOCRATISED by the www (ha and ha "Democracy is indespensable to socialism." [--V.I Lenin]) - where "everyone owns everything" - ha ha ha - until said everything (as ever) is sold-off to the CORPORATE fascists.
AND:
"When will an Anti Tax Party be availiable?"
As it heppened, 'Anti-Tax Movements' ALL became dead-in-the-water - once PAYE AND 'deficit spending' (without voter/slave/taxpayer approval) became the norm.
Not altogether unlike Hitlers's fundamentally incompatible 'oncept'of 'Nationalism and Socialism' (I.e. - National Socialism) Messr Mandelson, apparently, has a foot in each camp.
TRA!
RE: 'swaziorange' ... "Why should democratic countries allow Pirate Parties to exist?"
The 'entertainment industries' passé business models (TV, books/films and music) have been DEMOCRATISED by the www (ha and ha "Democracy is indespensable to socialism." [--V.I Lenin]) - where "everyone owns everything" - ha ha ha - until said everything (as ever) is sold-off to the CORPORATE fascists.
AND:
"When will an Anti Tax Party be availiable?"
As it heppened, 'Anti-Tax Movements' ALL became dead-in-the-water - once PAYE AND 'deficit spending' (without voter/slave/taxpayer approval) became the norm.
Not altogether unlike Hitlers's fundamentally incompatible 'concept'of 'Nationalism and Socialism' (I.e. - National Socialism) Messr Mandelson, apparently, has a foot in each camp.
TRA!
ISPs can only trace that as far as the router anyway as everything behind will be NATed. Therefore, they can only cut the nuts off an internet connection of someone who probably doesn't know what's going on anyway. How often is the bill payer actually doing the downloading? That’ll be an interesting statistic, I tell thee. (Side note: Seen how easy it is to hack a wireless network these days? Look it up. Now, //that's// illegal folks!)
See, thing is, P2P or bit torrent isn't illegal, it's what people share through it. You may be hard pushed to find, but there is plenty of perfectly legal (anything GNU for example) stuff up there for the down lo. Are you just going to get blacklisted / fined for your use of a protocol? ISPs will have an insanely hard time proving what you have downloaded, so that's how they will play it. How insane does that sound? Fined for using a protocol. That’s not far off from being fined for walking down a street funny.
Anyway. If my reasoning isn't too far off the mark, then the government may as well just instruct ISPs to block ALL P2P traffic. Why not, eh? Put your money where your mouth is. It’s not too hard to do technically and if you can just plain stop people from doing it. All this talk of fines, speed crippling, abusive letters, it’s expensive to implement and maintain, and quite frankly daft. If you are going to erode my civil liberties, do it in a cost effective manner damn it!
Then the internet would be nothing more than a glorified retail outlet. Oh, a place for people to socially network themselves into a jail cell.
The Internet should remain like the Wild West. That’s why it’s so great.
Mandleson, fsck off. Just die, will you? The core reason you've been
thrown out of government repeatedly is YOU'RE EVEN WORSE THAN
PORTILLO.
I appreciate that artists should be compensated for their work, but ultimately the people who whinge about piracy are the publishers, and short-sighted artists who just parrot what they are told (i.e. the type of artist that is good for the publisher's business, so the ones most likely to be signed to a label and be in the public eye).
The artists themselves are the ones with the abilities that people want - not the publishers. Musicians can still make money through live performances, so what is the issue if recordings are copied?
The reality of the world is that computers are common place, high speed data links are common place, so people's ability to get at data is easier and cheaper than ever. Getting data to the customer for 50-odd years was the (very profitable) business of publishers, but they have become obsolete very quickly with the rise of computing and the internet.
The old business models fail to work fully with modern reality, so the reaction should not be to prop up these dead businesses with stiffer laws and punishments. Especially when it sounds like ISPs will be forced to monitor what their customers are looking at on line, and who they are communicating with. Not only is this a gross invasion of privacy, it is ultimately pointless as there are many many methods of obscuring or anonymising internet traffic.
What a sad, misguided fool he has become.
As for people who steal music, movies and games, arrest them and prosecute the hell out of them. Its no different to shoplifting, and about time these kids grew up and realised that other people do not work for free for their entertainment.
copyright infringement is a CIVIL matter in british law.. this means that if you infringe on a copyright (by downloading a song or a video) then it is up to the copyright owner to enforce his own copyright.. if they fail to do so then the copyright is considered null and void
and fyi, the pirate party do not advocate copyright infringement.. they advocate copyright reform
you call stephen fry misguided and yet you seem to the misguided (and mis-informed) one here
Stealing takes away something. Copying a song digitally does not take away the song.
We don't expect to get something for nothing, we expect to have a listen and pay ARTISTS for good work. We do not expect to have to bail out a bunch of obsolete publishers who refuse to innovate and move with the times. Adapt or die.