UK Music Pirates "Can't Be Forced Offline"

[The_root_of_all_evil]

UK Music Pirates "Can't Be Forced Offline"

UK internet users who illegally share and download pirated material will not see bans from ISPs according to the Intellectual Property Minister David Lammy.

Lammy has been reported as saying that such a ruling would be hindered by legal complexities. "I'm not sure it's actually going to be possible," he said.

His comments come ahead of the government's Digital Britain report, a document that will detail suggested policies for the Cabinet to take on a number of issues, including illicit filesharing.

The Digital Britain report itself is part of the English answer to Europol's five year plan [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/87758] and is being written by Lord Carter, who you may remember from his perverse incentives [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/88917-UK-Entertainment-Industry-Proposes-Tax-On-Broadband-Access].

The DB report is also allowing for the creation of the Rights Agency, which would monitor and aid ISPs in blocking suspected filesharers. Most ISPs are against the idea, as trying to locate anyone illegally sharing software would be the equivalent of looking for any number of invisible needles in any number of invisible haystacks.

Last year the Culture Secretary Andy Burnham [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/88388-Are-Websites-to-be-Age-Restricted] said that the Government had "serious legislative intent" to enforce ISPs cut off illicit filesharers, while today Lammy suggested otherwise. "We can't have a system where we're talking about arresting teenagers in their bedrooms. People can rent a room in a hotel and leave with a bar of soap - there's a big difference between leaving with a bar of soap and leaving with the television," he said.

An unnamed music industry figure responded to Lammy's comments from a different angle: "The relative cost of stealing a bar of soap from a hotel might be small, but if it came to seven million people nicking the soap each year, which is what we have in the music industry, I'm sure that hotel chain would do something about it."

In essence, the government is trying to regulate ISPs through this Rights Agency and the ISPs simply don't want to be regulated. British Telecom, a leading UK ISP, says that "we're still hopeful that an amicable solution, without the need for legislation, can be reached. It doesn't make sense to try to get people online and at the same time scare them away."

Source: EDGE [http://www.edge-online.com/news/isps-may-not-ban-illicit-filesharers]

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[Cousin_IT]

An unnamed music industry figure responded to Lammy's comments from a different angle: "The relative cost of stealing a bar of soap from a hotel might be small, but if it came to seven million people nicking the soap each year, which is what we have in the music industry, I'm sure that hotel chain would do something about it."

Not if those 7million ppl paid for the room they wouldnt

 

[Aardvark]

Now imagine if 7 million people stole televisions from the Music industry...

 

[electric discordian]

Again the music industry fails to notice the punitive way it's dealt with "piracy" in the past has led to the prevalence of it now. According to the strictest translation of the PRS laws on performance its illegal to play your music with the windows of your house open.

There was a time when record labels gave albums away to Dj's as they were the ones that made the music popular by getting it out to a wider audiance now they dont do this so an occasional club Dj like myself when he is working has to buy the entire Uk singles chart every week.

Now working on the idea that on CD many venues are have now created a ban on copied CDs so I need to buy originals this can cost me £2 a CD. Which I only play one night a week and hate the rest of the time so inorder to do my job I have to fork out eighty pounds a week, I earn a hundred pounds per gig.

Is it honestly any wonder that people pirate music? Oh and lets not forget the fact that most of the music press is bribed to give favorable reviews and most of the bands I like dont feature in magazines and newspapers anyway. So buying an album not knowing how good it is and being unable to return it is a very real possibilty!

 

[Logan Westbrook]

An unnamed music industry figure responded to Lammy's comments from a different angle: "The relative cost of stealing a bar of soap from a hotel might be small, but if it came to seven million people nicking the soap each year, which is what we have in the music industry, I'm sure that hotel chain would do something about it."

While I do count piracy as theft, that isn't a great analogy. The only way that analogy would work would be if the hotel was charging people for the soap in the first place.

 

[mark_n_b]

What is up with the inane news coming out of the UK.

ISPs could very easily sight TOS to boot pirates off the service. It's not about legal complexities, it's about ISPs not making the money these pirates proffer, which is a significant chunk of change.

The music industry isn't losing nearly as much money as they claim when you take into account the increased distribution and marketing piracy offers, exclude the pirates that wouldn't have purchased the albums anyway, and factor in the significant number of music money makers that aren't CDs (namely events like concerts). And they are prepared to offer little compensation for the millions of people that it is suggesting ISPs shunt over to competitors.

This is one of those "non-news" statements, nothing's happened and I could have told you all that before the announcement.

 

[uppitycracker]

i'd be rather glad 7 million people are stealing the soap. the last thing i want is a used bar of soap when i stay at a hotel!

 

[vamp rocks]

whoah, whoah... i think we are all making a grave error here, we are seriously underestimating the amount of stolen soap, we need to crack down! lol

 

[blackcherry]

An unnamed music industry figure responded to Lammy's comments from a different angle: "The relative cost of stealing a bar of soap from a hotel might be small, but if it came to seven million people nicking the soap each year, which is what we have in the music industry, I'm sure that hotel chain would do something about it."

The music industry does realise this happens already right? Having worked in a posh hotel (part of a chain too), I can quite safely say that we had a big enough stockpile of toiletries to last a small country 10 years, all for the reason that people took them. It was factored into costs and just taken as the norm. Most people will take things that are free if its offered to them, or they think they can get away with it.

What this really boils down to is that the music industry is beating the same drum it has since it first realised it was losing control of the majority of music sales, 'its not our fault, its because of x'.

Instead of actually developing a viable alternative to keep occasional pirates (those who don't always pirate tracks or who would buy more if it wasn't at current prices) or tempt people into buying music again they bleat about how its unfair.

But then this is an old argument. Ever since the name Napster hit the public consciousness, its been a downward spiral for big distribution companies.

 

[shadowbird]

ISPs could very easily sight TOS to boot pirates off the service. It's not about legal complexities, it's about ISPs not making the money these pirates proffer, which is a significant chunk of change.

It is about legal complexities. The problem is not finding the person, the problem is proving that he did it. Because of things like open wireless networks, trackers providing false IP addreses etc., it's very hard to prove that the person did it and easy to make a mistake, even if his IP is seen as uploading/downloading the content. And if an innocent person can be accused wrongly, a guilty person can say that he's the victim of the same error. Also, you have to prove that the content is actually illegal copyrighted material. Just because a file says "the newest hottest X album 2009.zip" doesn't make it so, so the file has to be downloaded by the tracking software/person and checked to make sure it contains what it says, which is extremely expensive and difficult to do automatically on a large (thousands, millions of customers) scale.

How long would an ISP last if it disconnected people based on evidence gathered by a private firm (not police or government) using a system that is known to make mistakes? Or, how much would it slow down the internet traffic for everyone (including non-pirates), if some content-checking software & hardware had to check EVERYTHING that goes through the ISP's cables? Those are the kinds of things the ISP are fighitng against, since that would pretty much bankrupt them on the spot. Disconnecting actual pirates would only lose them the money they pay. Trying to implement the offered solutions would lose them clients regardless of their piracy status.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

Hang on, but haven't hotel chains noticed a drop in soap theft as the internet has made teleconferencing so much easier, therefore making business travel less necessary and making some aspects of hotels out of date?

I imagine the hotel industry noticed and immediately moved to new pricing schemes and adding extra value like free wifi in rooms and lower prices and aiming ads at different audiences, instead of trying legal action against anyone with the internet and a pillow.

Still, at least the music industry immediately embraced the new technology and invested in ways to make it profitable instead of ignoring it til it was too late and then blaming the public - oh hang on , that's not quite what they did after all.

 

[TechNoFear]

ISPs could very easily sight TOS to boot pirates off the service. It's not about legal complexities, it's about ISPs not making the money these pirates proffer, which is a significant chunk of change.

The iiNet v AFACT case in Australia is discussing the ISPs obligations to customers vs copyright holders.

One issue is that the copyright holders use a DSN lookup to track the IP, and so identify the account illegally downloading. This however is not accurate for a number of reasons.

Also an issue is the privacy and telecommunications laws in Australia, which make it illegal for ISPs to track users or for the ISP to give out customer details to a third party.

 

[Irishhoodlum]

Wow, who would have called it? A thread about pirating where half the users defend it not because they pirate themselves (what law abiding citizens they are), but because obviously 110% of all profits from Music, Videos, and Videogames goes directly to already rich CEOs and they're just "taking the man down". Duhhh it's not like those companies employ hundreds of thousands of employees, or anything, who need that money to live, or anything.

 

[Something Amyss]

Bad analogies are so fun to pick apart. In this particular case, those small bars of soap in hotels, well it really doesn't matter if you swipe them or not. Sanitation law forces the hotel to throw away any open/used hygiene products after each guest leaves, so it's lost money either way. It's a cost of doing business in that industry, and paid for by the room rental to boot.

But from an industry that thinks used sales are theft and assumes every download is a lost sale, I'm not surprised. They probably would reuse the soap.

In other words, I bet they thought this was an accurate portrayal, not factoring in every element from a logical point of view.

Point remains, the hotels aren't worried about soap theft, despite the "cost" as it would be factored by the music industry. It's never seemed very cost-effective to go after people who download music, and that was the original point. Hotels can accept the loss of "soap," or they can set up checkpoints to search bags, lobby the legislators, sue for loss of soap, and come up with new restrictive soap user agreements. Or they can just accept that soap is soap.

I'm not a fan of piracy. I spend a ton of money on music every month, and a bit on video and games as well. But the more aggressively piracy is chased down, the more expensive it is, and the more people get caught in the net. And, of course, it doesn't really get people to buy more music. In fact, I can't think of many better ways to lose customers than the way the media industries have been going about things. And then you ask the ISPs to get involved, or the authorities, and you're creating a huge hassle for everyone involved, costing them money, and for how much gain?

Yeah, it's their right to the pound of flesh, but is it really worth it?

 

[UtopiaV1]

Well, sooner or later Obama will step in and raid every teenagers bedroom with FBI agents. Just like in the anti-piracy warnings... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

Or maybe he'll finally get that bill through congress that SHUTS DOWN THE INTERNET!!! http://www.tomshardware.com/news/obama-shut-down-internet-legislation,7478.html

Fuck it all, pirates are dicks, the music corps are dicks, the government is too busy trying to give each side a figurative handjob whilst asking for respect. There will be no clean conclusion to this story, it will end in fascist polices or the collapse of capitalism.

Lol, i just read that back to myself. I need to stop sounding so apocalyptic...

 

[Dahni]

I don't care if the record labels are making less money because of piracy - they're dicks. They're only interested in the money to be squeezed from bands and will make a band change their sound to suit what the mass majority want. Bands get a relatively small amount of money from CD sales and if the band I love isn't going to benefit much from me spending most of my weekly income on a CD (which is £30 right now), then I'm not going to buy the CD.

Someone has already mentioned that the costs of finding the music pirates would be MASSIVE. It's difficult to prove they're doing it and it's easier for them to hide their I.P. If record companies want rid of music pirates, they should foot the bill themselves. However, if someone was to say that to them, they'd take a hissyfit because, in reality, the cost of stopping pirates is probably a lot more than the money they would have received, had those pirates bought every track they downloaded.

Plus, there's adverse effects on other parts of the economy. ISPs would lose a lot of money. If this figure of 7 million piraters is correct, and let's say, hypothetically, those 7mil pay £30 a month on their internet, phone line, etc. If every single one of them had their internet cut off, that's £210 million of lost revenue for ISPs in one month alone. Multiply that by 12 to get the figure for a year and it's just over £2.5 billion. This results in job cuts, reduction in spending on projects to help increase internet speeds, etc. because ISPs don't have the cash to install fibre optic cables to people's homes, or expand their coverage. This means job cuts within the ISP itself, and in industries that manufacture the cables and whatever else due to lost demand. Plus, reduction is government revenue because they won't receive tax on profits, etc.

I'd love to ask record companies if they're that desperate to cut off pirates that they're willing to foot the bill to find and prosecute them all (who seem to be mostly teenagers) & accept the instability they'll cause in another industry.

 

[Sevre]

So basically pirates in the UK can't be touched? Hmm, you know by posting this thread you may have converted so many brits to piracy.

 

[Amnestic]

So basically pirates in the UK can't be touched? Hmm, you know by posting this thread you may have converted so many brits to piracy.

Just because you can get away with a crime doesn't mean you will commit it.

 

[Woodsey]

Wasn't this whole business Darth Mandelson's idea? I doubt that numb nut has a clue - if this was in place then people would be getting banned constantly by accident, not to mention people getting banned because someone's illegally using their connection.

Something should be done, but this isn't the way.