The Digital Economy Bill: an engineer/producer’s view

The Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill now being rushed through the UK Par­lia­ment is, in my view, a dis­as­ter area of lack of under­stand­ing of the issues.

Ordi­nary peo­ple risk dis­con­nec­tion from the Inter­net — accu­rately described recently as “the fourth util­ity”, as vital as gas or elec­tric­ity to mod­ern life — with­out due process; sites could be blocked for legit­i­mate users because of alleged infring­ing con­tent. These are just some of the likely effects of the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill now being rushed through Par­lia­ment in advance of the elec­tion. And Swedish research indi­cates that mea­sures of this type do noth­ing to reduce piracy.

Pirates will imme­di­ately use prox­ies and other anonymis­ing meth­ods to con­tinue what they’re doing: only ordi­nary peo­ple will be affected. It’s quite likely that WiFi access points like those in hotels, libraries and cof­fee shops will close down because their own­ers will not want to be held respon­si­ble for any alleged infringement.

This bill will not solve any prob­lems for the indus­try — in fact it’ll cre­ate them. Sup­pose you send a rough mix to a col­lab­o­ra­tor using a file trans­fer sys­tem like YouSendIt. It’s a music file, so packet snif­fers your ISP will be obliged to oper­ate will, while invad­ing your pri­vacy at the same time, encour­age the assump­tion that it’s an infringe­ment. And you may not be able to access YouSendIt in the first place because UK access has been blocked as a result of some­one else’s alleged infringements.

Sup­pose you run an inter­net radio sta­tion. In the UK that requires two licenses, one from PRS (typ­i­cally the Lim­ited Online Exploita­tion Licence or LOEL), and the other a Web­cast­ing licence from PPL. Part of what you pay for the PPL licence is a dub­bing fee that allows you to copy com­mer­cial record­ings to a com­mon library. You might do that in “the cloud” so your DJs — who may be across the coun­try or across the world — can playlist from it, using a ser­vice like Drop­Box. How will the author­i­ties know that your music files are there legally? Do you seri­ously think they’ll check with PPL? Of course not. It’ll be seen as an infringe­ment, and your inter­net access could be blocked first, and ques­tions asked after­wards. You’re off the air and bang goes your busi­ness. Or you may have already lost access to your library because some­one thinks some­one else has posted infring­ing mate­r­ial to the same site.

Worst of all, the bill is being rushed through Par­lia­ment with­out the debate needed to get prop­erly to grips with the issues.

The bill as it stands will threaten the growth of a co-creative dig­i­tal economy.

The indus­try badly needs to review its posi­tion. We’ve known since the Warn­ers Home Tap­ing sur­vey in the early 1980s that the peo­ple who buy music are the peo­ple who share music.  In my view a busi­ness strat­egy that makes your cus­tomer the enemy is not a good one.

The pop­u­la­tion at large believes that a lot of the fig­ures for ille­gal file trans­fer are con­jured out of thin air — a recent report claimed that a quar­ter of a mil­lion UK jobs in cre­ative indus­tries would be lost as a result of piracy where in fact there are only 130,000 at present. This does not look good.

The indus­try has a his­tory of tak­ing the wrong posi­tion on new tech­nol­ogy. Gramo­phone records would kill off sheet music sales and live per­for­mance. Air­play would stop peo­ple buy­ing records (how wrong can you be?). And so on. The indus­try atti­tude to new tech­nol­ogy seems to be “How do we stop it?” We should instead be ask­ing “How do we use this tech­nol­ogy to make money and serve our customers?”

The indus­try is chang­ing. More and more record­ings are being made by indi­vid­u­als in small stu­dios col­lab­o­rat­ing across the world via the Inter­net. Sales are increas­ingly in the “Long Tail” and not in the form of smash hits from the majors. Instead of the vast major­ity of sales being made through a small num­ber of dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels con­trolled by half-a-dozen big record com­pa­nies, they’re increas­ingly being made via indi­vid­ual artists sell­ing from their web sites and at gigs; small online record com­pa­nies like Magnatune.com; and so on. It’s impos­si­ble to count all those tiny micro-outlets, and they are not even recorded as sales in many cases — mak­ing reported sales smaller, which is labelled the result of piracy when it’s in fact an inabil­ity to count — yet this is exactly where an increas­ing pro­por­tion of sales are com­ing from. I’ve seen some research from a few years ago even sug­gested that there was actu­ally a con­tin­ual year-on-year rise of around 7% in music sales and not a fall at all. And indeed the lat­est offi­cial fig­ures from PRS for Music (of which I’m a mem­ber, inci­den­tally) show that legal down­loads are more than mak­ing up for the loss of pack­aged media sales — and bear in mind that these num­bers may increas­ingly ignore the vast major­ity of those Long Tail outlets.

I don’t have all the answers to what we should be doing as an indus­try. It’s a time of change as fun­da­men­tal as the intro­duc­tion of the print­ing press. The scribes are out of a job — but the print­ers will do well once they get their act together. Right now we’re in between the old world and the new, and every­thing is in flux — we don’t know quite what is going to happen.

What I am sure of, how­ever, is that mak­ing our cus­tomers the enemy is not the way to go. We have to find answers that use the new tech­nol­ogy to advance our busi­ness and serve our cus­tomers, and not pre­tend that we can force the old ways to return, because if we do, we will all lose.

The Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill in its cur­rent form actu­ally stran­gles the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy — some­thing we need to help pull us out of reces­sion — rather than sup­port­ing it. It stems from old-age think­ing and lack of under­stand­ing of the tech­nol­ogy and its oppor­tu­ni­ties. It should not be allowed to be rushed through Par­lia­ment. Instead it needs an enlight­ened re-write that acknowl­edges what is really going on in the world and how we can make it work for us.

If you agree with me, please write to your MP and join in the other pop­u­lar oppo­si­tion now tak­ing place.