Those damned file sharing pirates!
p2pnet news view Music:-“Who would have ever predicted five years ago that there would have been such a thing as iTunes, which now has an 80% global share of all downloads?”
Who’d have predicted five years ago, there’d have been a Feargal Sharkey spouting on behalf of Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG?
If you’re one of those who believes everything Apple says, iTunes may indeed have 80% global share, but there’s a huge difference between that and what’s happening in the real world of online music — the world the Big 4 are desperately trying, and failing, to bring to its knees with lies and lawsuits.
There, iTunes counts for nothing.
“The music industry is often having to wait and see what works,” Sharkey told the BBC. “For several years now, the music industry has been the ‘canary down the coalmine.”
In case the canary bit leaves you somewhat nonplussed, once upon a time, when coalminers went below the surface, a canary in a cage went with them. If the bird dropped dead, it meant poisonous gases were present and the miners would head back to the surface rapido.
Is Sharkey, an ex-Punk rocker, correctly suggesting the Bug 4 are full of toxic emissions?
Meanwhile, he’s in charge of British Music Rights and the BBC story says UK ISPs have, “recently voluntarily agreed to engage and educate their customers about file-sharing”.
Engage and educate their customers? That’s a favourite theme of the MPAA’s Fact.
“There was some research done earlier this year that seemed to indicate that up to 80% of people would actually stop doing it with nothing more than somebody sending them a letter indicating they knew what they were doing,” the Beeb has Sharkey stating.
“That was backed by the research that we did, where young people were telling us that the reason they kept doing it was because they didn’t think anybody would ever notice.”
800 warning letters
Britain’s six leading ISPs, BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse, the BPI and the UK government recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding in which they pledged to “significantly reduce illegal file sharing,” p2pnet posted in August.
As part of the deal, Virgin sent 800 letters to its customers warning them, “if you don’t read this, your broadband could be disconnected”.
But, Carphone Warehouse, “insists it’s prepared to walk away from the table if draconian measures are introduced,” said PC Pro, quoting a spokesman as stating unequivocally:
“Our priority is always to protect our customer. We will look at any sensible suggestion . We haven’t got any plans to adopt any of those other measures at the moment.”
`Other measurements’ included instituting the practise that’s already causing so much consumer discontent in north America — ‘bandwidth management,’ aka ‘traffic throttling’.
And, “A panicky Virgin Media has disavowed itself of any possibility of taking legal action against, or banning, its customers as part of a corporate music campaign aimed at P2P file sharers,” said p2pnet, going on:
“Virgin Media has promised the BBC there’s, ‘absolutely no possibility’ of, `taking legal action or banning internet users as part of a campaign against illegal file-sharing on its broadband network’.”
Nonetheless, Envisional’s David Price told PC Pro, “Virgin only sent out 800-1,000 letters. It was only hitting a small amount of customers.”
The bigger question was, “whether the mass letter writing we’re going to see over the next few months will have an effect,” he says in the story. And,”The Government has said you [the ISPs and the music industry] have to come up with an agreement,” he says. “If they don’t make this deal, the Government’s going to legislate something on top of them.”
Enter Hollywood via the MPAA
Were that not enough, the ISPs have, amazingly, also agreed to develop music services for the labels, making sure they not only have their bread buttered on both sides, but around the edges as well, says another p2pnet post, quoting the BBC and going on, “The Motion Picture Association of America has also signed up.
However, the story didn’t say:
- How ISPs will determine who “hard core” file sharers are
- What technology will be used, and at what cost
- If costs for copyright enforcement will be passed on to users
- Who’ll do the identifying
- If children will continue to be targeted
- Who’ll bear the enforcement costs, and who`ll do the enforcing
- Whether or not the official taxpayer funded, Metropolitan police unit, “dedicated to combating movie piracy and those responsible for the manufacture and distribution of pirated films” will now turn its attention to music piracy
- If the various Big 4 ‘trade’ associations scattered around the world will share information on alleged transgressors
Back to the latest BBC story and Sharkey’s canaries reference, “It’s not just the music industry now,” he says.
“Over the last six months, you now have the film industry, the games industry and even ironically national newspapers that are now beginning to face exactly the same kind of issues that the music industry has been trying to grapple with.”
More than six-and-a-half million people in the UK have admitted illegally accessing and distributing music, says Sharkey in the story.
“We did research, speaking to 14- to 24-year-olds and it does get a bit disheartening when you realise that 63% of them were telling us that they were downloading music from the internet and not paying for it,” said Mr Sharkey.
“The bit that we are trying to get people to understand is this does have an impact and it is becoming unsustainable.”
The MPAA’s ‘Farcical Approaches to Copyright Transgressions,’ or ‘Federation Against Copyright Theft,’ would agree.
It claims a third of all 60,776,238 Britons are file-sharers.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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November 14th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
lol I think its ironic that if 1 person sent out 1000 letters saying theres $30,000,000 in a Nigerian Bank account is considered spam, yet if The Music Industry and my ISP did it, Its a legal threat
I propose another hurdle for the music industry, The humble SPAM filter Most ISP email automatically filter junk email and What if your email is forwarded to a Hotmail or Gmail?
“Im sorry Judge, my junk filter thought it was a hoax”
November 14th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
^ lol