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.
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