Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.
The survey – of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries – found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.
Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens.
International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.
“The right to communicate cannot be ignored,” Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News.
“The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created.”
He said that governments must “regard the internet as basic infrastructure – just like roads, waste and water”.
“We have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate.”
Interestingly though in Britain 55% of those surveyed believed there was also a case for some governmental regulation of the Internet. The gap between attitudes is what Mandelson is counting on in order to get the Bill through before the general election. Due process and the rule of law would continue their decline under this draconian piece of legislation, and this and successive governments would not just be allowed to censor the Internet as they saw fit (and in secret), but they would also severely damage the most important new communication resource since the telephone. For what? Appeasement of the Labour Party’s corporate friends? What’s getting lost in this argument are the facts about filesharing:
The Lords laid into the government last night, in a very emotive and passionate debate. There was anger, the same anger we are feeling.
Lords doubted that an accused infringer would have sufficient legal rights to appeal. They also made clear that the music industry and other copyright holders unleashed an “extraordinary degree of lobbying” in order to get the bill through as quickly as possible. Finally, Lords complained about the impact on libraries, universities and internet cafes with (open) wifi.
The Government front bench’s reply was disappointing to say the least. They don’t want to see unis in front of a court over infringement but don’t want to exclude them from the proposed law either.
The Government has been down playing the impact on these institutions and businesses in general and keeps saying that if we all behave sensibly it will all be fine. No it won’t.
The main problem remains that the account holder is responsible for infringements, not the infringer. The Government acknowledges that this is true, but doesn’t care.
Another worrying aspect is that the government thinks that it is unnecessary to pass on the bill to the Office of the Information Commissioner for oversight. They don’t even hide their intentions: It would delay the process of passing the bill into law.
There are some very serious concerns regarding the privacy of citizens and Lord Puttnam was right to accuse the Government of attempting to push the legislation through and not allowing proper discussion.
More importantly he said that the bill as it stands is not fit for purpose. Or a total mess you might want to add. Lord Puttnam said:
“I am absolutely convinced that, within the next two or three years, there will be another bill before this house which will be created to deal with the deficiencies of the present bill.”
Lords asked the right questions, but amendments were withdrawn or votes on amendments lost. The government’s idea to rush though with the legislation became apparent once more as they ‘discussed’ a block of 5 or more amendments at a time.
A whole lot of the bill remains unclear or unspecified and opposition peers have tried to get answers from the government. It may look like a naïve question when the Conservative front bench asks what hotels should do if they receive an infringement notice for a guest, but it points to one of the major problems of the bill.
How would internet cafes, libraries, universities deal with infringers? What happens to their connection of they receive the qualified amount of infringement reports from Ofcom? If they get disconnected how would students, for instance, continue their studies?
The government has not offered any satisfactory solutions to this problem.
The debate continues tomorrow with the most crucial pieces of the legislation, i.e. clauses 11 and 17. We will be tweeting from 4pm.
What can you do?
We want to make this bill a public debate across the country as the election approaches. That’s why we are asking you to write to your local paper and let people know that disconnection is wrong. Ask your MP and election candidates what their positions on the Digital Economy Bill is.
It’s time to get worried. By way of the digital economy bill, Lord Mandelson means to punish innocent people and limit their right to a fair trial. He means to grant his successors the power to block web content by order, without restriction. His proposals are aimed at restricting copyright infringers, but in reality will damage many people who have never done anything wrong.
The reason for this is as simple as it is unjust. Mandelson and the music companies monitoring copyright infringement can perhaps identify the household, business or cafe where someone is uploading a file, but they cannot identify which person or computer did it. Their answer is to make the internet account holder – the person paying the bill – liable for everyone’s actions. And then, to disconnect the entire household.
Disconnection of whole families is not an acceptable punishment. It is the modern day equivalent of banishment: it will disrupt social lives, education and people’s livelihoods. It is designed to threaten and intimidate, and cow people into behaving, with no regard to the consequences of using the law in such a manner.
Restricting the right to a fair trial, state censorship, disproportionate state punishment against households (and businesses of all kinds) for the actions of individuals – these are the tools used by tin pot dictatorships. The Executive Director of the Open Rights Group is right – this isn’t the way our government should be behaving over anything, and we shouldn’t be fooled – the people most at risk of the bill are younger people, who have amongst the least power in society, and who are currently possibly the most ignored minority group in the run-up to the general election. The bill will affect everyone, because it’ll give the government the right to arbitrarily censor the internet as it sees fit. Abuses by such laws are already kicking off in Australia, and it would be crazy to think the same wouldn’t happen here – when laws exist which can be abused, they are invariably abused; it’s the nature of power. Killock continues:
Hardly anybody thinks this bill is a good idea – outside of the music and film lobbies; not even most musicians I have spoken to. But politicians need to hear us much more loudly if they are going to react. You can help by contacting your MP, and explaining what this bill really means, to you and to others. You can take action with Open Rights Group: do it now!
Outside parliament, hotels and educators have complained that the bill also endangers their businesses and provision of the internet to the public because of its insistence that organisations providing net access should be liable for the actions of their customers.
The bill proposes a “three strikes” rule which would mean that persistent copyright breaches would be lead to disconnection from the internet. The aim is to reduce illlicit filesharing by 70%. But in a letter (PDF) to Lord Puttnam, representatives from institutions such as the University of London, British Library and the Imperial War Museum, said: “Because public institutions often provide internet access to hundreds or thousands of individual users, the complexity of our position in relation to copyright infringements must be taken into consideration.”
It says that the bill is unclear about the role of “intermediaries” such as libraries in the bill.
The letter added: “If this is not done, a public institution such as a library, school or university’s internet connection as a whole could be jeopardised, resulting in loss of internet access to large sections of the public, particularly the 15 million citizens without an internet connection at home.”
Meanwhile, the British Hospitality Association (BHA), which represents thousands of hotel, catering and leisure establishments, worries that the requirement in the bill for hotels to provide guest details to an internet service provider (ISP) where copyright infringement is alleged could be impossible in some cases – and that hotels might be disconnected if guests are persistently infringing copyright.
Disconnection would endanger a hotel’s business which the BHA said would be a “grossly unfair consequence” of a guest’s action.
It strikes me as bizarre the level to which the government is determined to control the population, to punish protest, to clamping down on freedom of speech, to the sharing of ideas, you name it. Throwing people off the internet without a trial? Banning websites because Secretaries of State don’t like them? No accountability for these decisions worth a damn? What would this do to schools’ internet access? Hotels’? Libraries? Is New Labour so inextricably wedded to monolithic corporate interests that it’s prepared to take British culture down in the name of ‘protecting copyright’?
The business case for the Digital Economy Bill hasn’t been proven: music profits are up, as are takings at the cinema. Certainly in the latter case it’s had something to do with better product being released, but a greater lesson was shown this last year as well in the case of copyright infringement and film. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was released early in 2009 to critical derision – it was a lousy film, which deserved to crash and burn at the box office. A near-complete print was even leaked to the Internet and circulated virally worldwide, yet the film did extraordinarily well. And there is no evidence whatsoever that the pre-release leak damaged the film’s takings at all – on the contrary it’s more than likely that it increased the excitement for the final print’s release. As with music, all the evidence shows that people are willing to pay for product they like, and ‘pirated’ material is in fact of benefit to the market, allowing people to decide in advance what it is they like. Why then should the rule of law be suddenly abandoned?
For that matter should schools, universities, hotels, libraries, all sorts of public buildings and organisations, suddenly become in effect state informers? Has the government learned nothing from the ISA debacle? It’s crazy to legislate with a wrecking ball to crack a nut. Noone’s suggested the problem of illegal downloading (or paedophilia in the case of the ISA) isn’t there, but this will hurt far more than the few who really are out to breach copyright on an industrial level. It’s not just stupid, it’s insidious and will damage us all.
UK Intellectual Property Minister David Lammy gave a speech to the MPAA in Washington DC recently during which he defended Lord Mandelson’s controversial “evolved” plans to disconnect repeat file-sharers from the Internet.
He said the proposal was important in “sending a clear message: when it comes to piracy and infringement, ‘digital is not different.’”
Check out the final link where it shows the research that filesharers buy ten times as much music as they download. Is that really the same as ‘real’ piracy? I don’t think so. And is barring people from the Internet for repeat filesharing, which has hit neither music nor film takings, really the right solution? Finland qualifies Internet access as a human right – what right then should Peter Mandelson have to cut whole families’ access, without even the say-so of a judge or jury? This is continuing spin in the favour of specific corporate interests, and the government should be called for it.
The Digital Economy Bill is a disgusting, illiberal piece of legislation which threatens all of our freedom of speech. It must be stopped, and the first step is by calling it out for what it is.
A lot of hyperbole is given over in this country to the idea that we’re somehow drifting into a police state. Some of it is valid, much of it isn’t – Jacqui Smith may have justified the Metropolitan Police’s arrest of shadow cabinet member Damian Green earlier in the year, but where is she now? The police may have been used a number of times this year to attack violently protest groups which the state decided were behaving contrary to its interests, but the furore was so great they’re certainly not operating overtly in such a way at present. Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill however in its current form would give him powers the likes of which the Chinese would envy:
What is the problem with clause 11 that I am getting so alarmed about it? It amends the Communications Act 2003 to insert a new section 124H which would, if passed, give sweeping powers to the Secretary of State. It begins:
(1) The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on internet service providers if the Secretary of State considers it appropriate in view of—Pausing there. Note that this says nothing at all about copyright infringement. For example the power could be used to:
order ISP’s to block any web page found on the Internet Watch Foundation’s list
block specific undesireable sites (such as wikileaks)
block specific kinds of traffic or protocols, such as any form of peer-to-peer
throttle the bandwidth for particular kinds of serivce or to or from particular websites.
In short, pretty much anything.
I do not exagerrate. The definition of a “technical obligation” and “technical measure” are inserted by clause 10:
A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.A “technical measure” is a measure that— (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.As you can see blocking wikileaks is simply a matter of applying a technical measure against all subscribers of any ISP.
Surely something must limit this power you ask? It seems not. The Secretary of State may make an order if “he considers it appropriate” in view of:
(a) an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or (b) any other consideration.Where “any other consideration” could be anything.
Francis Davey’s superb analysis of the bill is truly terrifying. The Digital Economy Bill would not just give Mandelson (or his successors) the power to ban say child porn sites immediately, but Wikileaks or any other site the state had issues with as well – on a whim. The power would not be limited by judicial or parliamentary scrutiny – it would be absolute. You’d have no idea he’d blocked the site, you’d have no comeback against him, and in short this would give government the ability to censor the internet as and when it saw fit in the most draconian manner imaginable. Davey’s right when he says this isn’t even about censorship – it’s a continuation of the regular New Labour attack on the rule of law and evidence based policy making. He (and they) must be stopped in this mad quest, because freedom of speech really is under threat, and if passed for example all the twitter campaigning the likes of which have shown some effectiveness against particular villains in the last year would be made futile by this bill.
No doubt the government will trot out it’s common spiel that there are no current plans to use this element of the bill, but if such powers aren’t needed then why develop them? History has always shown that powers when available are always used – RIPA, SOCPA, Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, you name it. Government agencies will line up to say the abuses of such powers weren’t what they intended, yet their very existence has led to local government and the Home Office to stamp all over civil liberties, be it against photography of public buildings in public areas or the right to protest itself. If Mandelson is allowed to bring about what’s contained in this bill we will move one step further towards a genuine police state, and that’s something we should all fear.
Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson — or his successor in the next government) the power to make “secondary legislation” (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).
What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright.
Of course it’s not unusual for New Labour to sidestep the rule of law. They did it with the Extradition Act, for which Gary McKinnon is paying a price, they’re doing it with the Independent Safeguarding Authority, for which we’re all paying a slow price, and they did it with Iraq, for which the whole world has paid a price. Unelected Peter Mandelson plans to give himself unlimited power to make laws and not have them subjected to scrutiny or approval by a single elected representative. It’s not just unfair, it’s a crime against democracy. To expand:
1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a “three-strikes” plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)
2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to “confer rights” for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)
3. The Secretary of State would get the power to “impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement” (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright “militias” can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)
These are all basic constitutional infringements – and for what threat? With the ISA it was to combat paedophilia which is apparently so widespread it threatens every vulnerable person in or around a workplace. Except it doesn’t. With Iraq it was to protect us all from weapons of mass destruction. Except there weren’t any. Now Mandelson is gunning for absolute power because piracy threatens what? Our culture? No. Our creative industries? Have you seen just how well the film industry is doing? He’s been told file sharing threatens the excess profits of New Labour’s corporate friends, and he’s making an unprecedented power grab to stop it. Andy Robinson of the Pirate Party UK asks:
What exactly is the ‘first tier tribunal’ referred to in the Digital Economy Bill? If that phrase does not mean ‘a court of law with a judge, jury and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty’, what is the justification for throwing out one of the major pillars of the British legal system?
Why should consumers not open their internet connection over wifi as a service to the community, and why shoul they not be treated as common carriers when they do so?
Why are libraries being given the right to ‘lend’ audio books digitally, but not the right to lend music and films digitally?
Why is file sharing good when libraries do it and bad when the public does it?
How will disconnecting people from the internet possibly help the bill’s stated goal of ’securing the UK’s position as one of the world’s leading digital knowledge economies’?
Why did the text of the bill appear on a record industry owned website before it appeared on any government site?
The bill includes a provision for unappointed, unelected, monopoly collecting societies to “assume a mandate to collect fees on behalf of rights holders who have not specifically signed up to that society.” Why should doing this be considered anything less than criminally defrauding the people these fees will be collected from and stealing copyright (in the true sense of claiming ownership, not the way it is misused as a synonym for infringement)?
Why does the government see file sharing as both to trivial that it can be dealt with by just sending a letter and simultaneously so serious that it warrants the imposition of a new £50,000 fine?
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, why does the bill not even mention the concept of ‘fair use’?
These are vital questions which should concern us all. In addition to constitutional norms, Mandelson is attacking basic cultural norms. My question is this – why should the concerns of Big Media trump a) the rule of law and b) the concerns of internet file sharers, whom it has been shown spend more on films and music? Rupert Goodwins quite rightly says:
industry bodies, such as the BPI, FAST and so on, [will be given] powers of investigation tantamount to those of the police force. The risk of copyright infringment would be enough to force any company to patrol its actions and offerings, closing down anything that might land them in the dock. The freedom of the Internet would be gone. It is placing the future of the Net, with the force of law, in the hands of those who depend on artificial scarcity. It is antithetical to everything that matters in the digital world.
Freedom in the real world has been under concerted attack by these people, and they’re now extending their control to the digital world. They must be stopped at all costs.
I’ve been trying in my previous posts to give you an idea and a little bit of background in the whole world of being a musician, and quite what the costs are involved in getting involved in such an industry. This post hopefully will allow me to tie up any other thoughts, and then from here on in we can start looking at what is going on with the filesharing issue in particular and also the ins and outs of things we should know, understand and appreciate when deciding whether to go out and buy a cd or to jump on Pirate Bay or something similar to download the track.
Firstly this whole phenomenon is nothing new – I’m sure I’m not alone in sitting recording the tracks on radio 1 chart show when a bit younger in order to catch the top forty. Annoyingly of cause the dj would start talking just before the end of the song thus wrecking the end of the song, but you would then religiously listen to on your way to and from school. There was then of cause CD, minidisk and a whole host of other mediums to copy music from one place to another. This is even before making mixtapes for your latest beau and friends.
So what has changed this time? We often hear people say that copying music has happened forever, this is just the latest in the line of ways of exchanging tunes and that people shouldn’t get so upset about it. To a certain extent I would say this is true (remember although this is probably borderline anti-filesharing I still haven’t made a decision which way I am swinging on the issue…) but the differences are stark. For a start the ease of getting whatever your wanting to listen to. Whereas before you’d have to find a mate with the cd of the band your wanting to listen to, then convince them to tape it for you, then get the damn thing back again and then being able to listen nowadays you can jump on the internet, neatly dodge the porn and its there nicely in your player for your aural pleasure.
Depending on where you look on the internet, to the point that I wouldn’t even like to start quoting the numbers I have seen you can find a whole array of figures that have been spun by various industry ‘officials’ but we do know it is affecting sales – just taking a walk around HMV (or wanting to have a stroll round Virgin) would show that where there were once mountains of CDs are now games. Ironically of cause many of these games allow you to play along on virtual guitar with bands playing their hits, but where there once were CDs, there are now games.
But has it affected the industry as much as we are made to believe? Is there a way to keep recorded music at a high quality, when there is no money available to develop the ideas and sounds that can only be found and developed in a studio?
Lily Allen’s shrill and ultimately hypocritical argument that filesharing causes blanket damage to musicians, and that Peter Mandelson’s threat to throw users off the internet is a valid one, is masking the true problem here. Doctorow suggests:
Copyright is problematic for everyone: musicians, fans, bloggers. The absence of clear affirmative rights to make personal copies, to share with your friends, to copy for the purposes of discussion and commentary (as opposed to the fuzzy and difficult-to-interpret fair use guidelines, which have been further confused by the entertainment industry’s bold attempts to convince us all that they don’t matter and can’t be relied upon) means that we’re all in a state of constant infringement.
A law that no one understands and no one abides by is no law at all. Parts of copyright — the right to regulate how commercial licenses with industrial entities work — are really important to me and to all working artists. But if we continue to try to expand copyright to cover everything, every interaction that involves a copy (which is every interaction these days), then the broad consensus that copyright is nonsense will continue to grow, and we’ll lose the good stuff as well as the ridiculous stuff.
He has a good point. The precursor blog to this site was once set upon by a newspaper journalist whose (uncredited) piece I used (and fully linked to/did not take credit for) to illustrate the impact of an entirely unrelated story. Was I breaching copyright? I don’t think so – he was of an entirely different opinion though. The issue at hand in this debate about filesharing is surely about copyright reform – addressing the enormous gap between creators and rights holders. I’ll see if I can nudge The Secret Musician into posting their opinions about that! Why though has the Featured Artists Coalition moved closer to Allen/John/Barlow/Blunt et al’s argument?
We the undersigned wish to express our support for Lily Allen in her campaign to alert music lovers to the threat that illegal downloading presents to our industry and to condemn the vitriol that has been directed at her in recent days.
Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.
edit: I’ve just seen this story. Fascinating, and it blurs the issue even further. Why would the FAC have a different position to Allen one day, then “cheer her” as she entered their meeting last night? Intriguing that she should be there, even more curious that what appears to be a massive compromise (read Ed O’Brien’s comments) should be in her favour…
It’s not just the Featured Artists Coalition lining up against Lily Allen, Elton John, James Blunt, Gary Barlow et al in the filesharing debate. Muse’s Matt Bellamy has written to Lily Allen herself, arguing:
“My current opinion is that file sharing is now the norm,” Bellamy wrote, adding that internet service providers [ISPs] “are not being taxed by the copyright owners correctly”.
Bellamy then compared the internet to radio and TV, both of which pay copyright owners a fee for using material they do not own. “Broadband makes the internet essentially the new broadcaster. This is the point which is being missed,” he stated.
“Also, usage should have a value. Someone who just checks email uses minimal bandwidth, but someone who downloads 1GB per day uses way more, but at the moment they pay the same. It is clear which user is hitting the creative industries and it is clear which user is not, so for this reason, usage should also be priced accordingly.
“The end result will be a taxed, monitored ISP based on usage which will ensure both the freedom of the consumer and the rights of the artists.”
It seems to fit in with the Canadian idea of a form of internet taxation to change behaviour, whilst acknowledging that technologically the genie is very much out of the bottle. I don’t agree that taxing usage makes much sense – I use about 1GB a day without illegally downloading a single thing and don’t think I should be penalised for doing so. The Canadian model makes more sense because it doesn’t set out to punish, which is a largely pointless exercise in this debate anyway – no government has the resources needed to detect, catch and punish the number of people who download illegally as Peter Mandelson has mooted.
Does there need to be a system for identifying which internet users do hit creative industries? Perhaps, but I’ll be damned if I can think how. I support very highly the notion of an internet free from needless regulation and control, and fear this could be the top of a very slippery slope. Surely the real issue is copyright reform and how creators are adequately paid by rights holders?
I don’t want you to think that in my last post, or this one, I’m moaning about the costs of being a musician. Quite the contrary, there is no more brilliant thing in the world of shopping than going into a music shop with your hard earned cash in your pocket and buying some new amazing toy thats going to make everybody jealous. You pay your money and take your choices. My point in these couple of articles is to give you the idea that the shiny disk, or mp3 you have in your hand and ipod is not the beginning and end for these people. Certainly the introduction of programs such as X-Factor have made this concept more alien – you walk into a room, you sing a song, you get Christmas number 1 and you’ve made it. Going off topic I think the worst thing about these programs is that it gives anyone and everyone the idea they could do it. If you really want it, get into the pubs and clubs, get your act sorted and see what happens from there.
I digress. So we’re about to burst into the murky world of the music industry as a career rather than as fun. This bit is very simple. You get signed to a label, which means you have a whole world of marketing, production, contacts to name but three at your disposal that noone would have given you the day before. But this costs money.
I’m going to keep this purely hypothetical and certainly different artists have different contracts, but I’m going to try to keep it as a average type of thing. Normally bands and artists sign a deal for say 3 albums. For those albums the record label gives you a certain amount of money (lets say £500,000 *at the moment thats a lot in the industry!). This money is essentially a loan, you’ll have to pay it back with a huge amount of interest on top. Out of this money you need to pay for your recording and all that goes along with that (mastering, production etc), your marketing and plugging for magazines and radio stations, and your touring costs – this is not simply money for your back pocket!
The first £500,000 you make belongs (more or less) to the record company. No one should ever think of people in the music industry as fans of music, they are hard nosed stoney hearted business men. If it all goes pearshaped you will still be expected to give this money back. If they decide they don’t like what your doing and drop you from the label (essentially make you redundant) you still have to pay this money back. On top of this money they will take a lovely big cut of anything else you make. Think of it as a tin of beans from Tesco, they buy it from the supplier, push it around a bit, sell it for a bit more, keep the profits. The music industry is no different in many many ways.
Other things currently happening include labels now starting to take cuts from touring royalties, merchandise that maybe made to sell at gigs, appearance fees etc etc - traditionally all the things that would take the humble musician from being someone who earns a bit of cash but nothing special to being the more affluent type of human.
And that my friends is why you’re hearing about lots of musicians talking about file sharing, yet very little from the actual record label. But more on that next time!
I’m sure Katy Brand had no idea when she was lampooning Lily Allen, saying she would ‘try anything’, that she really would try anything. From the blog she set up to put forward her views against filesharing she reports:
Famed rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) was apparently on CNBC recently talking about his “business acumen.” I have to admit that having three different people all trying to interview him at once is rather annoying — as they almost never let him complete a thought. However, when they ask him about piracy, and whether or not it makes him angry (around 2 minutes), he responds that: he sees it as a part of the marketing of a musician, because “the people who didn’t purchase the material, they end up at the concert.”
Famed rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) was apparently on CNBC recently talking about his “business acumen.” I have to admit that having three different people all trying to interview him at once is rather annoying — as they almost never let him complete a thought. However, when they ask him about piracy, and whether or not it makes him angry (around 2 minutes), he responds that: he sees it as a part of the marketing of a musician, because “the people who didn’t purchase the material, they end up at the concert.”
Guess whose article belongs to whom. It’s remarkable that someone who is so vocal against piracy should break copyright so readily. I however find her anti-piracy position particularly remarkable, given the route which her rise to stardom took. Word of mouth in the internet age can only really come from the internet, and is only really going to be based on people sharing music they’re interested in and excited about. Why is Lily Allen so eager to bite the hand which fed? The Pirate Party UK suggests:
Lily Allen is a decidedly old media creation, tarting herself up with new media to boost sales but otherwise not interested in it. At the same time, Allen is the wannabe voice for an on-line generation. The truth is that she does not speak for that generation. Allen spends too much time talking to her accountants and not enough time listening to her audience. The sledgehammer laws that Allen endorses could only succeed in punishing music fans and reducing her own profits.
In a letter to the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, he said: “I am of the view that the unchecked proliferation of illegal downloading (even on a “non-commercial” basis) will have a seriously detrimental effect on musicians, and particularly young musicians and those composers who are not performing artists.”
The letter comes as talks to heal a growing rift in the music industry over piracy broke down today , with a group of artists including Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, Billy Bragg and Tom Jones accusing labels of stubbornness.
The artists are part of the Featured Artists Coalition, whose members also include Annie Lennox and Blur’s Dave Rowntree. The FAC took the rest of the music industry by surprise by publicly announcing that it has “agreed to disagree” with labels over government proposals to suspend the internet connections of persistent filesharers.
“I could have been dropped from my record deal because so much was spent and so much of my album was leaked and not paid for. But luckily my label had great belief in me. File-sharing has had a very, very negative effect on my career, as it has on many others.”
He added: “I think it’s very positive to see that other artists, along with the government, are coming together to defend the right to protect our art.”
This is all hyperbole and no fact. The Wolverine movie was widely leaked before its cinema release, but the leak to p2p services made no impact to its takings. In fact considering how awful a movie it turned out to be, it was shocking that its leak had no financial impact. How on earth has Cruz’s album being leaked had a negative effect on his career? How can Elton say sharing music has a ‘detrimental effect’? Lily Allen says:
The music industry is now facing destruction because people have stopped buying music. For every car sold in the UK , a small piece of that profit will go to the designers of the cars, there are thousands ands thousands of other people working in the motor industry that need to be paid too. If we stop paying for a product, the industry supporting that product falls apart, as we have seen over the past few years. i hope that made sense….
Well sorta, but I don’t think the comparison is a valid one. Unless she can prove that the downturn in music sales is uniquely down to filesharing, there’s no reason why the downturn in the music industry hasn’t been down to a period of terribly bad product being made. And she can’t. And neither she nor Elton has attempted to come up with a credible justification as to why the government should be able to terminate households’ internet connections for what is overwhelmingly a civil offence. Maybe they should take their blinkers off and start encouraging their colleagues to make better music, just to see what happens!
It seems at the moment everyone has an opinion on filesharing and whether music and film is a entity that should be available to all for free, or at a premium cost. What is interesting however is the lack of knowledge that most people seem to have about the basic facts behind these opinions. I think for us to start understanding exactly what is going on with this situation we should try and get a few solid facts into the equation. Being someone who has been in and around the music industry for several years we are going to focus on this side of the topic (apologies to any film buffs out there!).
Unless your phenomenally lucky, or an X-Factor winner there are large amounts of outlays from the moment you decide that the life of a rock and roll star is for you. Firstly you have to buy your equipment (or if your very lucky get it brought for you!). Thinking about my own band, my guitarist uses a Rickenbacker guitar (£1,500) with a Telecaster back up (£400(ish)). He plays through a 2nd hand Vox amp (£750). I am remarkably poor, have a Fender Bass (£600 with staff discount (my past is slightly colourful)) and an Ashdown amp (£500). The drummer has a Yamaha drumkit with 3 cymbols, as well as the hi-hats (£2600). Next time you see a band in a pub remember there could be well over £5,000 worth of gear infront of you without really even breaking a sweat.
Before you can start playing a gig you have to get good. Studios in London start at around £50 for 4 hours. You probably need to practice at least once a week, I always recommend twice if possible. Playing a gig is also quite an expense – van hire (£100 a day), or taxi (£outragous amounts) to get the stuff to the venue followed by food, beer, buying drinks for people who support your band week in-week out averages out (for me at least) at about £50 a show. We play around 8 shows a month.
This is before your band has even thought about getting signed and making it into a career.
You have played your gigs and got a couple of songs you think are going to set the world on fire, so you need to record it. Depending on where you go to record it these costs can give even a vaguely successful musician nights of sleeplesssness, and the constant dilema – do you sacrifice the sound to save money, or sacrifice that weekend in Barcelona with the other half for that extra special production. Sadly for my misses its always the latter! Recently we recorded our latest single. Normal signed bands would aim to record and produce a song in around 4 days (depending on a WORLD of factors but bare with me!) we recorded and produced two songs in a weekend in a very middle of the range studio. It cost us £1700. This is cheap – I agreed to play keyboard and the guitarist guitar for them on two sessions for free in exchange for some money being taken off and for us to work with their top in house producer. You’ll find a lot of this sort of wheeling dealing going on at the grass roots of this industry. It then costs £100 an hour for the tracks to be mastered (brought to a sound level that they can be played on the radio). Two hours later we had the tracks in our hot and sweaties, and didn’t eat that evening.
We then sent our tracks to our label to get pressed onto a limited run of 7″ vinyl (£1200 for 400) and I spent the next weeks evenings burning cd copies to send out to radio stations, magazines, record labels, management labels, publishing houses, music lawyers, anyone who could like us and give us a leg up into playing with the big boys. Replies are few and far between (remember there are hundreds of people all vying for these opportunities) we found we were getting 1 in about 20, but after hearing other horror stories we were doing well.
Now, if your very lucky, your in the position where your about to get signed…
It is with great fear and trepidation that I accepted the offer from Jason to blog about the pros and cons of file sharing with special interest in looking at the issues in my own field of expertise of the music industry. This is because the last time I decided to talk about something remotely political I had to escape a near on riot through the cellar of a slightly grotty east end pub. Hopefully writing this blog will be slightly less life threatening, and involve a lot less alcohol before deciding to write it. No promises though.
The subject matter that fateful night (although at best the details are hazy) were pretty much as emotive as the subject I’ve been asked to write about here. It seems everybody has an opinion as to whether film makers and musicians are money grabbing parasites paid for doing little more than a hobby, producing something that deserves to be in the public domain, or are the cream of the crop in their field, deserving of the accolades both in fame and money that come from such industries.
I think right here and now, before we start exploring the opinions and hopefully cutting some facts from the propaganda from both parties, I should tell you a little about myself and where I am coming from in the argument. I am a signed musician and earn enough money that I don’t lose money in following what is essentially my dream job, but that’s about it. I also have a full-time job, a part time job and haven’t taken a holiday except to see my mum in 4 years. Certainly over the years of playing in bands, djing, being in orchestras and such I have spent more than I think I could ever expect to get back from the industry, without a lot of help and a lot more spending before seeing the profits of my work.
I am constantly asked about the issue of file sharing and which camp of thought I reside in. In truth I chop and change my mind constantly, swinging from the ’stuff it I’d rather have people listening to my stuff rather than not’ through to ‘penny pinching gits all its costs is 79p’ so when asked to discuss the matters for Cosmodaddy I jumped at the chance of arguing both sides of the case, hopefully with the help of you, my friends, giving me some pointers and arguments in comments about what you have read and think. I’m not convinced there is a definitive answer to the question, but maybe by exploring the issues we can make some better informed judgements on what we do, and do not download rather than buy.
All being well there should be a new post on here at least once every two weeks so keep checking back from time to time to see where my meandering thoughts may lead me. Don’t forget to leave a comment or two if you feel so inclined, hopefully though you won’t feel the need to hunt me down to my usual east end haunts and chase me out of the pub!
These are all basic constitutional infringements – and for what threat? With the ISA it was to combat paedophilia which is apparently so widespread it threatens every vulnerable person in or around a workplace. Except it doesn’t. With Iraq it was to protect us all from weapons of mass destruction. Except there weren’t any. Now Mandelson is gunning for absolute power because piracy threatens what? Our culture? No. Our creative industries? Have you seen just how well the film industry is doing? He’s been told file sharing threatens the excess profits of New Labour’s corporate friends, and he’s making an unprecedented power grab to stop it. 
I’ve been trying in my previous posts to give you an idea and a little bit of background in the whole world of being a musician, and quite what the costs are involved in getting involved in such an industry. This post hopefully will allow me to tie up any other thoughts, and then from here on in we can start looking at what is going on with the filesharing issue in particular and also the ins and outs of things we should know, understand and appreciate when deciding whether to go out and buy a cd or to jump on Pirate Bay or something similar to download the track.
It seems to fit in with the 
I don’t want you to think that in my last post, or this one, I’m moaning about the costs of being a musician. Quite the contrary, there is no more brilliant thing in the world of shopping than going into a music shop with your hard earned cash in your pocket and buying some new amazing toy thats going to make everybody jealous. You pay your money and take your choices. My point in these couple of articles is to give you the idea that the shiny disk, or mp3 you have in your hand and ipod is not the beginning and end for these people. Certainly the introduction of programs such as X-Factor have made this concept more alien – you walk into a room, you sing a song, you get Christmas number 1 and you’ve made it. Going off topic I think the worst thing about these programs is that it gives anyone and everyone the idea they could do it. If you really want it, get into the pubs and clubs, get your act sorted and see what happens from there.
Guess whose article belongs to whom. It’s remarkable that someone who is so vocal against piracy should break copyright so readily. I however find her anti-piracy position particularly remarkable, given the route which her rise to stardom took. Word of mouth in the internet age can only really come from the internet, and is only really going to be based on people sharing music they’re interested in and excited about. Why is Lily Allen so eager to bite the hand which fed? The 
It seems at the moment everyone has an opinion on filesharing and whether music and film is a entity that should be available to all for free, or at a premium cost. What is interesting however is the lack of knowledge that most people seem to have about the basic facts behind these opinions. I think for us to start understanding exactly what is going on with this situation we should try and get a few solid facts into the equation. Being someone who has been in and around the music industry for several years we are going to focus on this side of the topic (apologies to any film buffs out there!).
The subject matter that fateful night (although at best the details are hazy) were pretty much as emotive as the subject I’ve been asked to write about here. It seems everybody has an opinion as to whether film makers and musicians are money grabbing parasites paid for doing little more than a hobby, producing something that deserves to be in the public domain, or are the cream of the crop in their field, deserving of the accolades both in fame and money that come from such industries.
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